The Student Room Group
Reply 1
You wasted your money on the CLC, I'm afraid.

To take you from nothing to relatively advanced: Latin: An Intensive Course, by Moreland and Fleischer. Also get Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer. Good luck.
Teaching yourself A-level is not... difficult. Basically, it requires a heftier grasp of the basic grammar and vocabulary, and being able to apply it to more difficult text.

The things I studied for AS Latin - Murder at Larinum - the Pro Cluentio by Cicero, and Catullus. Currently, to prepare for undergraduate Latin which is A-level standard, I'm reading 'de bello gallico' by Caesar, and Seneca.
I had to read the Aeneid by Virgil for AS latin.

I personally disagree with cloudofcalm - I think that vocabulary and basic latin grammar can be self-taught, however, when you get to translations of A level difficulty, you need someone to poke you in the right direction here and there and explain why you don't have any verbs in a sentence and why this has a present tense third person singular ending when the subject of the verb is plural. And then there are other grammatical tidbits that are annoying as hell when it comes to trying to understanding them.

In short, get a teacher.
Reply 4
does anyone know any colleges or universities that teach latin a level on a weekend?
Reply 5
I don't know of any weekend Latin based courses but if you're really serious the Joint Association of Classics Teachers would have links to any that existed, as well as links to summer courses like the one at Wells. (www.jact.org)

Textbooks I found useful included Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer (a godsend when it comes to finding obscure grammatical usage but a nightmare to navigate - have paracetamol ready!) Ashley Carter's Latin Unseens to A-Level (really good practice at AS, A2 and AEA level) and Roy Hyde's Latin Unseen Translation (again really good practice). When it comes to literature, I think verse is probably harder without a teacher to guide you when the word order gets ridiculous, when you hit syncopated verbs or different uses of case. As boring as they are, prose texts like Caesar's Gallic Wars book 1 and Cicero's speech against Catiline are probably easier to translate without a teacher because the Latin is more straightforward. Just for the record, I did Ovid Amores 1 for AS literature and Aeneid 12 for A2 literature, while my A2 unseen authors were Livy and Ovid.
Reply 6
Hope you don't mind me digging up this really old thread but www.latinsos.co.uk
is great for A level Latin :smile: and there's a textbook coming very soon to go with it!