This beginners’ course follows the 3-book Nick Oulton course, So You Really Want to Learn Latin. (Camp will lend you the textbooks for the duration of the course then we recommend that you buy book 3 at the end to continue your progress.) We have a strong line in supporting students who begin Latin at university, or you might be at a school not fortunate enough to teach Latin. Alternatively you might be preparing for public school entrance examinations and want to consolidate your existing knowledge. (There is, for example, virtually nothing on the common entrance and scholarship syllabus which our course does not cover somewhere.)
We progress rapidly through the basic grammar and syntax to establish strong reliable building blocks, with emphasis upon practice of the grammar via the medium of writing sentences into Latin.
The key language we cover includes:
- Nouns and adjectives of all declensions
- Active, passive and deponent indicative verbs of all conjugations
- The main irregular verbs
- Infinitives and imperatives
- The importance of principal parts
- Present and perfect participles
- Indirect statements
- The main constructions which use the subjunctive
There is an optional revision session before supper, covering the key grammar learned that day or anything else students ask to go back over. At the end of the course the students sit an actual GCSE past paper (with just a couple of very minor modifications) marked by actual GCSE standards. The average mark across the beginners’ cohort is usually a comfortable A-grade. (NB this is in no way an official qualification – just a means for beginners to see how far they have come in such a short space of time.)
Click here to see the detailed beginners’ scheme of work. (This is based on what has happened in previous years and will of course vary a little year on year.)
There will be a small amount of work we will ask students to complete in advance of arriving at the Summer School. Further details will be sent nearer the time.
Occasionally people join us for just the first week of this course which is fine. Very occasionally someone who has studied a little bit of Latin, comes for the second week only in which case we ask you to make sure you’ve covered the grammar from the first week. (The scheme of work will show you where in the course the group will be for the start of week 2.)