ATAR Notes: Forum
VCE Stuff => VCE Languages Other Than English (LOTE) => VCE Subjects + Help => VCE Latin => Topic started by: gibsonaxxxs on January 03, 2012, 01:08:56 pm
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HEYYY guys
whaddya doing to prepare for Latin this year??
coz i hav no idea where/how to start preparing... after doing preety bad last year... :( hmm
also, how hard is it to get a 40+?? raw?? just wondering... :D
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You should read the whole of the Aeneid by Vergil.
And a 40+ raw score shouldn't be too hard if you put the effort in
;)
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hav u finished, or ru doing it this year??
whoa - the whole of the Aenied? English/Latin?? :O
lol fun times ahead... :P
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I'm doing it this year, but I'm just passing on the advice past Latin students
gave to me
;D
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You should read the whole of the Aeneid by Vergil.
And a 40+ raw score shouldn't be too hard if you put the effort in
;)
well given that there were only 17 people in the whole state who got 40+ in 2011, i would perhaps say that it is actually fairly tough
but Sherv mate, as long as you know your vocab you should be fine aha
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You should read the whole of the Aeneid by Vergil.
And a 40+ raw score shouldn't be too hard if you put the effort in
;)
well given that there were only 17 people in the whole state who got 40+ in 2011, i would perhaps say that it is actually fairly tough
but Sherv mate, as long as you know your vocab you should be fine aha
but do you need to do extremely well in the exam? coz i know a couple of friends doing latin, and they really don't care how they do coz of the scaling anyway... is this the same with u guys' friends?
how much vocab do u reckon??
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I did Classics in 2010 and Latin last year and never read the whole Aeneid... I really don't think it's necessary.
You probably won't start on the set Virgil until the second half of the year anyway, but reading the set book (I'm not sure which one it is this year, you can look it up on the VCAA site) in English and a summary of the rest will be enough. When it came to writing essays, I basically had a stock of examples from other parts of the Aeneid which I knew just enough about to mention and discuss briefly, which was good enough - you don't need to have actually read it all.
40+ raw is difficult but achievable, but it's worth bearing in mind that Latin is such a small subject that anything over 35 is a good achievement (and also basically equivalent for ATAR purposes).
Vocab is a really good idea. The unseen translation is 45% of the exam - you will have a dictionary, but the less you use it the better. By the end of the year, because I knew a fair (not amazing - a lot of people were better than me) amount of vocab and had got good with the grammar structures, I was really quick and that is seriously helpful. On the exam I did that 45% in about 20% of the time, and having extra time on other stuff is a huge help - particularly if there are some unusual things elsewhere on the paper, having time up your sleeve to figure out what to do with it is handy.
This is a really long-winded way of saying vocab and grammar. Do that.
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This is a really long-winded way of saying vocab and grammar. Do that.
lol thanks :D
how did u get ur grammar and vocab really good?
coz i started latin in yr 10, and didnt have much time for it at all last year... so i'm forseeing a struggle this year... :s
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Sadly there's no easy answer with vocab and grammar... Vocab especially, it's just a matter of going over it (our teacher used to advise 5 minutes a night, but whatever works for you in terms of memorising stuff) enough that you become familiar with it. I'd suggest doing small blocks at a time, that's always best for vocab in any language - take 20 words and make sure you know them back to front and after a few days at the least go to the next set.
Grammar is also a matter of practice although here you can get more help - Latin is really formulaic in a lot of ways so textbooks generally do a good job of explaining the grammar in ways that will stand you in good stead for being able to deal with grammar wherever you see it.
You will need to do practice unseens before the exam because in unseens the grammar sometimes takes a little deviation from the normal rules, so practice is the only way to get used to that and be able to go with it. But it's not worth practising unseen translation before you have vocab and grammar fairly solid - don't worry about being perfect, but grounding in that stuff before you move into translation is important. Given you'll definitely be doing plenty of translation during the year, I'd definitely focus on vocab and grammar now - if you have a textbook it should have sentences, translating those is good for vocab and grammar as well.
I know plenty of people who thought they were in for a struggle at the start of Year 12 and ended up doing as well as they wanted/need to. It can be a bit of a slog, good luck!
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Thanks ferg.
and a huge congratulations on your results.
but according to Hennessy, you were almost unbackable favourite to top the cohort for Latin...as if W.M. beat you.
did you get a statement of marks back?
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^^hi DW.
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^^^ Thanks so much for ur advice, Incommensura!! :D
Congrats on ur scores & atar - were u the THE top of the state 4 Latin? i didn't think it was even possible for people to get so high raw - omg ur my inspiration :P
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My best friend got 49, the tiny little bitch...
But neither of us were expecting anything anywhere near that high raw! We both got pretty lucky I think, but work at it and you can lock in a pretty respectable score!
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Hi all,
To get a 35, what kind of marks would you need to get end of year exam? What range if sac marks are averaged at high A?
Thanks
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if anyone taking vce latin in 2013 has any Latin grammar related questions over the summer or wants help with translations, you can usually find help on ##latin through AN's chat portal.
connect to the chat, and then type
/join ##latin
or ask in #vce
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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.
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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