learning Latin
I fear, O Helena, you are too sanguine in your advice to IacobusCanis. I take it from your comments you did not study Latin. I did, and I can tell you I doubt very much that anyone can do it on his own, no matter how hard he tries. It's too different from English; there are grammatical and syntactical concepts that are utterly foreign to the English speaker, even if he has a perfect command of the language.
So, Jimthedog, if you really want to learn Latin, I suggest you get yourself a text book (Bennet's New Latin Grammar is a classic and the one we used in my class long ago) and find someone who can offer some tutoring. If you are intelligent and you work very hard at it (I had Latin class one full hour every day in school and 2 hours homework every night, including Friday) you can get by with a minimum of help from the tutor -- just enough to get you over the stuff you will encounter which is totally foreign in concept.
But be warned. I was part of an elite accelerated program and we learned everything at a much more intensive and accelerated rate than normal classes. It took us one full school year to learn the basic Latin grammar and do some reading in Caesar's Gallic Wars, the famous book that begins, "Omnia Gallia divisa est in partes tres." We took the first 3 weeks in the following year to learn some fairly abstruse grammar concepts (including gerunds, the subject of recent posts), then tackled Cicero. When we began our third year, we took 2 weeks to learn the rules of poetry, the figures of speech, etc., then spent all year reading the Aeneid. So you can't learn it overnight, or even overyear, and that's with teachers wiht a PhD who spent a lifetime teaching Latin.
Having said which, I now say, by all means, try it. Even if you don't master it, you'll learn something and you'll get a lot out of it.
