My 12 year old son started Latin this year

Dear Evan,

My 12 year old son started Latin this year and I’d like to join him on his journey – most likely he’ll be helping me rather than me helping him. I started downloading your Latinum podcasts in the hope they also will help get me started.

The “My first/second/third/fourth Latin Lesson” series was an excellent help and I understood everything. I also find the vocab podcasts extremely helpful and enjoyable to listen to. However, the jump in level between these and the grammar, even the first Adler lesson, Pensum Alterum, I couldn’t cope with!

For me, the material went from simple English examples straight into “words whose genitive end in i” – which, when it comes to Latin, says very little to me. I speak fluent German and am very familiar with cases. Despite this, I’m having a lot of difficulty finding a way to get from “Venus Martium amat” to the first Latin declension, with five or six cases, of words whose genitive ends in i. In Latin, I don’t have enough base knowledge to be able to link things together, but I also don’t know what knowledge is missing!

Your help would be greatly appreciated! What do I need to do to make the jump – I’m a little frustrated at the moment, but I don’t give up easily.

If the upload times of the podcasts are anything to go by, then you also work till the wee hours on a regular basis - hope you find time to answer.

Thanks for your help,

Adler is divided into three sections - each lesson has part a b and c.
Part A is almost exclusively grammar. In the first parts of the first episodes, I do go into great detail about nouns, far more detail than is necessary in the beginning, perhaps.

If you look here http://www.e.millner.btinternet.co.uk/languages/Latingrammar.html
I have made some grammar tables that might be useful, especially if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, where I have made some tables that I personally found very useful, but have yet to see presented in this form in any grammar textbook.

Let me know if these tables are useful, or clear enough. Perhaps I should link them more explicitly to the Latinum podcast's main page.

Part b , as you will have realised, is English-Latin, with no grammar, and part c repeats the material with no English.

You will be able to pick the language up intuitively, more or less from listening to parts b and c. . Adler's method is actually designed for this. The grammar in Adler is descriptive grammar, describing forms that you are learning intuitively through use. In that sense, it is less important than in some textbooks, where the learning is generated through grammatical rules. If you download Adler's German-English textbook, which is still in print, (Do a google search for Ollendorff Adler German) and compare them, you might find this useful, as the two books follow a similar structure.

I would select the English-Latin part b episodes, and learn those, then the part c. Only after youhave covered a few episodes in this way, would I then go back and do the grammar sections for the earlier episodes. Then, I would return and study the grammar with him in detail, which will make more sense as you will have some language structures in your head to relate to.

I would also download the textbook, and the answer key print up a chapter at a time....ask him the Latin questions, and have him respond.

Then, have him ask you. Keep the learning as active and conversational as possible.
The written text may also be easier for you to interpret to him, in terms of grammar.

You may also ask him to write out some of the translation exercises, after he has learned the lesson.

Hope this helps.

Evan.