Alpha Teach Yourself Latin in 24 Hours

By Stephen Beall

"Teach Yourself in 24 Hours" offers an excellent format for learners of foreign language with its highly structured, step-by-step and comprehensive teaching style. It educates readers through 24 hour-long lessons including drills and exercises to effectively master the fundamentals of Latin.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0028639324
• ISBN13: 9780028639321
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Alpha
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.1" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

best Latin book for beginners

I highly recommend this book to anyone beginning to learn the Latin language, for a number or reasons. Not only does it have clear explanations that can be understood by somebody who has never studied the language before, but it also has a much more straight-forward style of teaching than most textbooks. For example, Latin textbooks usually teach declension 1 first, then the 2nd declension, then the 3rd, and so on. The problem with this is that it means that the student must learn what all of the cases mean and what they are used for right away in one go. This is difficult for many people. Alpha Teach Yourself Latin makes it much easier by intoducing it case by case - first the nominative, then the accusative, then the rest, one by one. The organisation of the book is excellent. The book is divded into 24 lessons, each lesson taking about an hour to go through. So, as the name suggests, going through the entire book will take about 24 hours. Each hour introduces one or two main grammatical concepts and works around that. The student is given texts to read which are adapted to only include grammatic concepts taught so far. Another reviewer mentioned that "Latin Made Simple" is a good text to accompany this book. All I can say is - please, please do not waste your money on that garbage. If you look at the review for that book, many reviewers have mentioned that there are a number of errors in it. Overall, Alpha Teach Yourself Latin in 24 Hours is the best Latin text for beginners. Go for it! =)

Excellent Organization of Latin Grammar

Mr. Beall has done excellent work breaking down Latin grammar, which makes this book quite valuable. For example, he avoids the common bane of most Latin textbooks: presenting all five cases at the same time. With Mr. Beall's approach, the grammar is introduced sufficiently slowly. The primary drawbacks are that there is not enough original Latin included in the book (a constant problem with Latin textbooks), and the original Latin included in the later chapters is usually too difficult.

Great Book

This book is probably not for someone that just wants to learn a tiny bit of Latin and thinks that learning a language doesn't require a good deal of work. Nor is this book for someone who knows nothing at all about languages including English. This book IS for people that are roughly familiar with languages and would like to learn the framework of a language and a good deal of vocabulary in a relatively short amount of time--in order to, say, translate some Aquinas with a dictionary close at hand.I had 12 hours of Greek as an undergrad before studying Latin, and Beall's book is far superior to any of my Greek texts. I took a grad class using SB's book meeting with a prof for one hour a day for 24 days and in that time I learned enough Latin to be able to translate fairly proficiently given only 4 weeks. Beall's book is good because you learn grammar AND vocabulary as you go. By the end of the book you've memorized 100's of very commonly used words and are thus less dictionary dependent. His method is excellent.