Latin for 2012 - WOOT!! - waddya doing?? tips from past students??

[FlorianK]

Didn't do Latin in VCE, but I did Latin from year 5 to year 10 and did pretty decent in exams like 2-4 mistakes in a whole caesar text. My advice would be fuck the vocab man and learn the grammar. You have a dictionary and from what I've seen when I looked at the Latin exam is that the text to translate is quite short so you actually have enough time to look up the vocab during the exam, however you need to know the grammar. Grammar is crucial in Latin. Know all your endings of verbs adjectives and nouns and what they mean in terms of grammar.

[binders]

Following on from Florian's post, here are some online resources that some of you may find useful in coming to grips with latin grammar.

The Latin Driller Killer is online practice in word forms, for when your hand begins to cramp.

Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology is an online only, but searchable reference for all those gods and characters you will encounter when reading your text.
It's the precursor to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, and is still quite useful. For example, if you want to search on Iris in the Aeneid, the article returned may help you with background info for your essays or analyses.


Free Ebooks:
Kennedy's Latin Primer has loads of paradigms and grammatical explanations, as well as some useful tips on, for instance, remembering which 3rd declension nouns take -ium vs. -um in the genitive plural.


Gildersleeve & Lodge's Latin Grammar is a much more detailed and sadly, pretty dense reference grammar, if you want to take things further.

The New Latin Grammar (actually pretty old) is more detailed than Kennedy's, but less so than Gildersleeve's.

Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman antiquities contains descriptions of many of the cultural institutions of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as they day to day things such as clothing, buildings, tools and so forth. As with Smith's other dictionary listed above, each article contains references on where to find more info in the original sources.

Smith's English-Latin Dictionary probably  isn't very useful for VCE Latin, but it can be useful to see the distinctions in similar words by comparing how the english word translates.

and last but not least, although it has been linked before in the Best Latin Dictionary Ever thread, Whitaker's words