[thaumasiotes]

> It's a book that starts off with very simple sentences and gradually introduces more complex topics like tenses and declensions as the story goes along.

I'm not sure this is actually an approach I'd recommend. I was recently asked to give some supplemental English tutoring to a Chinese brother and sister, 9 and 5 years old. The 5-year-old could already use and understand 'simple' sentences such as "what do you see?" and "where is your brother?", though I'll note that the subject-auxiliary inversion required by a question of that form isn't exactly a simple concept.

I got them a copy of The Cat in the Hat, and their mother objected that it was too advanced for either of them, because most of the verbs in The Cat in the Hat are in the past tense, which apparently isn't covered within the first four years of Chinese English instruction.

You can't learn what you're not exposed to, but you can learn a lot of what you are exposed to in a language.

[satvikpendem]

Lingua Latina is for adults who already have some base level knowledge of tenses in their own language, preferably a Romance or Germanic language (as I believe some languages don't have tenses), not for children who have no concept of them. Once you start reading the book, it really does start to make sense while teaching you the various forms. It's on Internet Archive if anyone wants to read it: https://archive.org/details/lingva-latina-per-se-ilustrata-p...

[thaumasiotes]

> preferably a Romance or Germanic language (as I believe some languages don't have tenses)

A couple of points:

- If you natively speak a Romance language, learning Latin by example is going to be really easy for you. This doesn't belong in a comparison with anything else.

- Germanic speakers have no special advantage over any other Indo-European speakers.

- You might be interested to know that while Mandarin verbs don't inflect for tense, the negative particle does, so you have to observe a distinction between past and present tense whenever you're negating a verb.

我不理解 I don't understand

我没有理解 I didn't understand

[jhbadger]

I think there is a big difference between learning a living language versus a classical language like Latin or Ancient Greek. The point of learning a living language is to learn practical ways to communicate. While there are tiny communities of people who enjoy talking in classical languages, the vast majority of people learning a classical language do so to read real classical texts in the original.

[thaumasiotes]

I'm not sure how this responds to my comment?