Thanks for the perspective! I guess it depends on the outcomes in question

If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.

As a former pupil that took 7+years of Latin, I think the probability of actually reading latin texts fluently today would have been orders of magnitude higher had instruction been coupled with Ørberg. I still want to be able to read hobbitus ille, but no thanks to my Latin classes (and I think I had decent teachers).

I've only been on the student side of this (with Hebrew), but that has been my experience as well. These sorts of books can work, but it needs extraordinarily good teachers to do so.

I haven't read it in years, and my Latin's pretty rusty now, but it was the most useful and fun thing I used.[1] If you get the book, you might also like Mr. Ørberg's recordings (widely pirated) of himself reading the text with a Classical pronunciation. There are also some good Latin YouTubers; my favorite is Satura Lanx, <https://youtube.com/@SaturaLanx>, but Luke Ranieri, <https://youtube.com/@polyMATHY_Luke>, is also good and very knowledgeable.

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1. Disci latíne quando cathólica eram quia melius Missam ac Offícium légere volébam. Nunc non christiána, neque Missa assísto nec Breviárium canto, sed multas antiphónas pulchras (et verba pauca!) iam mémini.

Duolingo has a Latin course.

Or you can find learning a Slavic (or a Baltic) language easier if you learn Latin first. The bonus being that there are more useful cognates in Latin than in Slavic languages (although while learning Czech, I was a bit amused to discover that many of my childhood friends’¹ surnames were just Czech words for colors). Latin has fewer cases than Czech (five³ versus seven) and fewer declension patterns (there are five declensions with most nouns falling into the first three. In contrast, Czech has twelve and the adjective declensions differ from noun declensions (as opposed to Latin where adjectives follow either a first-second declension pattern or a third declension pattern).

Slovene is a bit simpler in its grammar and lacks some of the tongue-twisting phonemes of Czech (albeit with lj being a challenge for learners).

I don’t really know much of any other Slavic languages beyond the ability to occasionally decipher Polish or Ukrainian billboards via cognates. Bulgarian apparently has abandoned nearly all inflections in its nouns other than the genitive which perhaps makes it one of the easier languages to learn.

For those who want to learn Ancient Greek, in my limited experience, I’ve found Biblical Greek instructional texts easier to work with than Attic Greek (the grammatical differences are not that great with the biggest differences being more in vocabulary than grammar—it seems a smaller shift than between, say Elizabethan English and contemporary English).

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1. I grew up in an essentially vanished American subculture where ethnic diversity meant that there were a handful of Italians amongst the Czechs and Poles. The Czech population of Chicago, which once was the majority population of the West side of Chicago has since dispersed and assimilated to the point where there are only a couple Czech restaurants left in the whole Chicago area where even twenty years ago they were fairly common. The Poles, having a still-active immigration pipeline and larger population to begin with² have not suffered the same fate.

2. While there were a large number of Poles on the West side of Chicago, the larger center of the Polish population was, and still is more Northwest side.

3. Technically, Latin has six, but the vocative case only differs from the nominative in the second declension singular and so is generally omitted from declension tables.