|
Catalogue
Currently, from Languages Come Alive®, you can have these three enthralling story-texts
Patricius et Hilda
Alone in Rome
Mystery, History, Culture, & Latin
From
Finnbarr Dunphy
illustrations by Deborah Scherer
Chapter 1
In The Street (In Viā)
he year is A.D. 79. Outside the Roman Coliseum, a twelve-year-old boy (puer) and a nine-year-old girl (puella) stand listening to the noise (fragor) coming from inside the walls. The fragor sounds like hundreds of people shouting, screaming, and cheering, and the young puer, whose name is Patrīcius, and the little puella, whose name is Hilda, wonder what is going on inside.
Chapter 15
Libertus
Claudius, Metella, Davus, Claudia, Patrīcius, Hilda, et Celtillus sunt in triclīniō. Familia est laetissima. Davus garrit et garrit. “Patrīcius est magister meus,” inquit. “Iam ego etiam sum gladiātor optimus. Ego et Patrīcius similiter pugnāmus.” Claudius etiam garrit et rīdet. Metella spectat sed tacet. Est atonnita. Hilda et Claudia etiam spectant et inter sē garriunt. Etiam sunt atonnitae. Patrīcius tacet et rīdet. Celtillus tacet et audit.
|
Plunge into this story of adversity and triumph set in AD79, the year Vesuvius explodes and casts Pompeii in stone. Learning Latin with each step, we follow the trail of an Irish family violently ripped away from their colony in Celtic Britain. Their mother is cut down defending them, and their father is knocked unconscious by a war sledge and, as are they, hauled away in chains by a gang of slavers. After a week of sailing, shackled to spars aboard a ship, the young teenager and his still-younger sister find themselves suddenly separated from slavers and fellow slaves and in a vast city, teeming with people speaking strange tongues. Thus begins their story and our own building of a sound foundation in Latin. We are there with Patricius and Hilda, Alone in Rome.
Fifteen chapters take us from a smattering of useful words and phrases through to a conclusion that is almost entirely in Latin. Each chapter begins with an original illustration specific to a key action taking place in the chapter. Each chapter has informative cultural segments, related directly or tangentially, always building the student’s understanding of the period and its peoples. Finally, each chapter’s vocabulary list comes complete with definitions and a phonetic guide to pronunciation. Teachers have acclaimed this story-text as the best beginning Latin text they have ever used. Priced at just $25.00US plus shipping it’s a very inexpensive way to get a foundational education.
Friends and Foes
Amigos e Enemigos
Mystery, History, Culture, & Spanish
From
Finnbarr Dunphy
Spanish collaboration Maria Bravo -- Graphics Alan Geoghegan
Using the universal stage of modern sport, specifically the world of high-level amateur soccer, a world in which Finnbarr Dunphy moves with ease, we get to know the three remaining members of the family O'Higgins, and the people who inhabit and, in ways large and small, influence their world. We find ourselves also in Buenos Aires, slipping, along side them, into their rapidly changing world. We see Carlos and Loretta as they mature beyond their teen-age years, trying to help their mother cope with the death of her husband, their beloved father, Sarsfield. We see Brother Burke, coach, colossus of control at Cardinal Newman College, trying with his kind, if firm, hand to guide his boys, especially Carlos and his closest amigo, Eduardo, through these very difficult years of passage. Change for our new friends, as in our own lives, can be scary, but it comes to all things. It's just that we never know if this time we must face our personal Rubicon. As our Spanish vocabulary grows, almost with a life of its own, we too grow with the decisions made, the changes faced, from cover to cover in Friends and Foes.
The same trademark format that sets the Languages Come Alive series above all others, the one that has made Patricius et Hilda so successful, in the classroom and with homeschoolers, is employed to bring us from having little-to-no Spanish beyond Hola! to a quite respectable vocabulary, reading, and speaking ability, thank you very much. And, this exciting "page-turner" story-text, true to the format, also gives us culture and history to flesh out both places and people. Again, as with our facility with the language, we find ourselves, virtually without effort, growing in our understanding of worlds we might, otherwise, never have known. As is the case with our English-to-Latin, each chapter’s vocabulary list comes complete with definitions and a phonetic guide to pronunciation. Get all this for $25.00US plus shipping. Asombroso!
Triail le Tine
Trial by Fire
Mystery, History, Culture, & Irish Gaelic
From
Fionnbharr Ó Donnchaidh
agus
R. Mac Conmara Ó Géibheannaigh
In the year of Our Lord 879, in the west of the Irish island, along the banks of the life-giving Shannon, the Mac Laistre family, their clan and community and all that lived in and surrounding the internationally famous monastic conlegium of Clonmacnoise, found their lives abruptly changed forever. This story-text is set, arguably, in the last of the Golden Ages of Ireland. Their expansive international trading and the constant traffic of students and scholars from the Continent notwithstanding, the Irish of this period were the purest example of unsullied Celtic cultures left. To help you see what was Golden about this age, we conjure up the alchemist.
Imagine a society that valued honour and knowledge over the rest of earthly achievements, looking at all the world’s scholarship with almost child-like openness. Imagine a society that expected all of its men and women to bear arms, even its religious, yet so trusted its laws to be just that the people would champion a fair and brilliant verdict even if it went against them. Imagine a society, while aristocratic, hierarchical, that extended even-handed justice all the way down to its slaves, where Noblesse Oblige and hospitality were the bed-rocks of the entire community. Imagine a society in which men and women had universally equal rights, and each could rise to his or her best potential, including priesthood within the Irish Catholic church, in which religious could marry and raise families, even inside the cloistered communities. Imagine a society that sought out every worthwhile innovation, whether in art or commerce, and yet saw itself, spiritually and vitally, as related, co-equal, amongst all other parts of the universal creation.
In our age, such a society sounds a fanciful Utopia. The Irish island was not Utopia but these were its ideals and the social, religious, legal, and governmental structures were meant to support them. Such was the world of the Mac Laistres in this time before the conquests of English law and the Roman church which made outlaw and anathema these Celtic ways.
Again, using mystery, history, and culture, Finnbarr Dunphy and MacMara O’Geaney give us a beginning taste of the modern Irish tongue and we, in words lifted off the back cover, “…learn about the truly remarkable place that was Ireland, 1100 years before the Celtic Tiger, some 700 years before the potato was introduced as fodder for princes made peons.”
Triail le Tine--- Trial by Fire: vol. I. Story-text together with a CD pronunciation guide. At a paltry $25.00US, plus shipping, sure, you’ll find it cheap at the price.
|
