Latin Reader Nature Study and Easy Stories, for Sight Reading During, the First Year in Latin (Classic Reprint)

During the first year pupils must form the habit of reading Latin. If we had the material, they might learn to read Latin as they learned to read English, by reading. What can be done to get this material? Of what should this material consist? We are preparing them to read authors. Our own experience has often shown us that the first few pages of a new book seem difficult usually the most difficult of the whole book and so much so that we might say of many books: Well begun is half done. The majority of pupils who read much Latin, read Caesar, Cicero, and Vergil. Their first attack upon each of these authors is nearly always made upon the first pages of the Gallic War, Book I or Book II, the First Oration against Catiline, and the First Book of the AEneid. Their reading during the first year can be made to contain every important word and every form and construction occurring in those few pages. During the first years work, students of Latin are obliged to read hundreds and even thousands of sentences illustrating Latin forms and syntax. Those sentences are for the most part fragments of the sentences of Caesar and other Latin authors and are usually arranged so as to illustrate and review the use of certain constructions with regularity and precision. Now if those sentences can be made to tell something worth knowing and remembering, the pupils interest will not have to be either forced or lacking, and he may find some encouragement to re-read many times and even to memorize passages illustrating the more common forms and constructions and fix them forever in mind. He will also be enabled to bring into play those instincts (that have already been so well trained while learning to read his own language) by means of which he has gathered the meaning of hundreds of English words from their connection in sentences and not lapse from the first into the helpless