Latina Est Gaudium (Now with extreme textbook geekery!)

[akujunkan]

Score! A friend and I spent a couple of hours rummaging through the local used book store today. This place has grown tenfold during the three years I was in Japan; what started off as a two-room storefront operation has expanded into two levels and myriad little rooms branching off in unexpected locations, in the traditon of the finest used book stores in the world. (I'm looking right at you, Caveat Emptor!)

Anyway, while poking around I came across a book entitled Second Year Latin, and whose name was that on the spine if not Mr. Charles Jenney's himself! Predictably, I was ecstatic, as it was priced at a mere $9.99 and still in pristine never-been-touched ex-schoolbook condition.

I have a great deal of love for Jenney's latin textbooks and their wonderfully unapologetic focus on grammar, and the fact that they're organized more intelligently than the other systems. (I'm looking at you Wheelock's; you're one of the main reasons I dropped my Classics major the other being that pesky Greek requirement.) My heart will always belong to the Cambridge Latin Series, but Jenney's is much more suited to individual review and as a grammar resource for all those bits I never quite picked up in class.

"Enjoy it," the Owner Lady told me as I left the store. "I guess..." (I doubt this was a book she'd ever expected to see leaving her store.)

But alas, my enthusiasm has faded slightly in the intervening hours, as I am not certain if what I purchased was in fact, Jenney's Second Year Latin or Scudder's Second Year Latin, and a Library of Congress search has not yeilded definitive results. But hey, it still contains Caesar's De Bello Gallico, which is what I've been itching to read of late (and the reason I'm brushing up on Latin in the first place).

That will be all.

Comments

[sara-tanaquil.livejournal.com]

Yay for Latin geekery!

You might like Moreland & Fleischer. (I would provide an amazon link, but am too tired after ten hours on the New Jersey turnpike. Bug me later if you can't find it.) It was designed for a super-intensive Latin summer course, and is really very good and very thorough in its explanations.

I HATE Wheelock. (Love Greek, though. Come on, if you can master Japanese and Korean, you can learn Greek.)

Good luck with that Caesar!

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

Oh. Thank you. Very much. I'd this bizarre, recurring dream of being lost in a bookstore that was once a house, with different levels, and ramps, and stairs, and such. I'd thought it must be somewhere in B'town, but my sister insisted there wasn't any such place. So that link cleared up a nagging mystery -- they moved. ^^;