Ecce Romani I: A Latin Reading Program : Meeting the Family, Rome at Last

By Gilbert Lawall and Addison Wesley

Book Overview

The softcover split edition of ECCE ROMANI 1 contains chapters 18 through 27. View the Ecce Romani Interactive d104book This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801312019
• ISBN13: 9780801312014
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Longman Pub Group
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.8" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Fundamentals are not rigorously presented

I liked this book series when I first too Latin; and I did learn and retain a great deal of vocabulary. This series, however, is English passages about a Roman family translated into Latin, then presented to the student to translate back to English. While this makes translation easier in the beginning, it inculcates poor habits. One can get through multiple textbooks in this series with little more than guesswork. No grasp of verb or noun endings is truly required, and all sentences are ultimately structured similar to English - this leaves the student quite shocked and helpless when presented with a text written by someone who thought in Latin, which is much more freewheeling with it's subject-verb-object placement. Even after spending years with this series, I had to start at the bottom with Wheelock's Latin in order to learn the fundamentals. All that said, I do think the Ecce, Romani series has a place as it is more accessible to a younger audience, 6th to 10th grade. This is also a good choice for a brief survey course of the Latin language, one intended to whet the appetite, not lead to full fluency.