Latin Without Tears
Table of Contents
or One Word a Day
What! Not another Latin Textbook! Haven’t you got enough already with Catholic’s Latin Instructor, Latin by the Natural Method and Elements of Latin by Benjamin D’Ooge with Answer Key?
Well, I confess I bought yet another Latin course called Visual Latin - a course with Bible based stories with videos, workbook and quizzes - but my 8 year old daughter was finding it a bit challenging past Lesson 12 or so. Her anguish reminded me of the preface to this book, which I have reproduced below. So I thought I would give Latin Without Tears a try.
The scans are available on the Internet Archive. I found them good enough to print without editing, so I haven’t made a Lulu copy.
I have made a set of Flash Cards for pages 1-8. I have grouped them by page number in one envelope and transfer them over to another envelope for words in memory as we go over one word a day. Then we drill those words in memory briefly every other day or so.
That’s enough from me, over to Mrs Mortimer!
To my little readers:
Did I not say in my last letter to you when I gave you the Captivity,1 that I could, write no more books, for that I was too weak, and ill, and old? Yet I have given you now another book. What is the reason of this? Is it that I am grown well and young? Oh no! We never grow younger.
But it is not I who have written this book, but two little boys, Freddie and Willie, under the care of a governess. I was so sorry to see little boys often crying over their Latin lessons, and I thought of this plan of telling them a word a day, and I told the little boys to make sentences with them. At breakfast there were shouts of joy on hearing the new word, and there were leaps as well as shouts when running into the drawing-room after breakfast to show me their new sentences upon their slates.
After one year and a half these boys, between seven and nine years old, could read the Latin extracts from St. John at the end of this book. The story of Jesus is the most beautiful in the world. It was not first written in Latin, but in Greek, yet it shall be sung in ALL languages by some of all nations when Christ returns in glory. May you all be there to sing it with
Your loving Grandmama,
FAVELL LEE MORTIMER,
Rivulet, Dec, 7, 1876.
Footnotes
- The Captivity of Judah, by Favell Lee Mortimer - she has several other books available on Project Gutenberg and more on the Internet Archive.