The Drills

Vol. 0: Reading the Marks

No drill — this is a reference to return to, not a skill to rehearse. When a mark puzzles you in a later volume, come back here. The one habit worth forming early: when you meet a new word in marked text, notice its macrons and say it held-long where they sit. By the time you reach the unmarked stones, the lengths will live in your ear, and you won’t miss the bars.

Vol. 0: The Cases Hiding in English

One round of the self-test per train journey; no peeking before opening. Round three is the one to re-run until the four disguises stop catching you — that's the skill the whole volume exists to build. When Duolingo next serves an opaque sentence, run the six questions over the English first; the Latin endings then arrive as answers to questions you've already asked, rather than spellings to memorise.

Vol. 0.a: Tricks of the Ear

One hook per day, no more. The test comes free with Duolingo: when a form is spoken, name the person and tense from sound alone, before translating — "-bā- plus -t: he-was-doing-something" — and only then let the meaning land. When the timestamp and the person arrive before the vocabulary does, the ear is trained, and every volume above this one gets easier to hold.

Vol. 0.b: Time in Plain English

Two habits, no desk needed. One: for a day, catch yourself mid-sentence whenever you say had — "the train had left", "I had meant to" — and silently tag it pluperfect. Hearing the tense in your own mouth demystifies it faster than any table. Two: the grid drill — pick a verb, fill all six English cells aloud (was writing, writes, will write; had written, wrote, will have written), then swap in the Latin from Vol. VIII's system table. When the two grids feel like the same grid — because they are — this volume has done its job and the names will never fog again.

Vol. III.a: Pointing Words & Particles

Run hic, haec, hoc down its singular columns aloud until huius and huic stop feeling like typos. Then take any worked sentence from Vols I–IV and bolt a demonstrative onto its subject and object — mīles templum videt → hic mīles illud templum videt — checking each pointer agrees three ways with its noun. The weasel sentence is the touchstone: if you can say why it's haec, the system is yours.

Vol. III.b: Possessive Words

Take any noun you’ve drilled and run meus through it in two cases, then swap to tuus, then vester — canis meus, canem meum; canis tuus, canem tuum; canis vester, canem vestrum. Hear how the ending (case) and the stem (whose) move independently. Then test the reflexive: say “she loves her own dog” (suum) and “she loves her dog” — someone else’s — (eius), and feel Latin make a distinction English can’t.

Vol. III.c: Where the Endings Blur

Take the syncretism table and, for each ambiguous ending, write two short sentences that force opposite readings — one where amīcī is “the friends” (plural verb) and one where it’s “of the friend” (paired with another noun). Making the ambiguity yourself, then resolving it, is how you’ll learn to spot it at reading speed rather than stalling on it.

Vol. III.d: The Words That Don't Move

Take any sentence from Vol. IV or Vol. VII and add one adverb to it, out loud, without touching anything else — mīles templum videt → mīles templum saepe videt, → mīles templum celeriter videt. The point of doing it aloud is to feel that nothing else in the sentence has to move to accommodate the new word, which is the opposite of what happens when you bolt on an adjective and have to check three things at once.

Then run it the other way: take five adjectives you already know from Vol. III, produce the adverb, and use each in a sentence where the same adjective also appears in agreement. Mīlitēs fortēs fortiter pugnant is clumsy Latin but excellent practice, because saying fortēs fortiter in one breath puts the whole volume in your mouth at once.

Vol. IV: The Verb Engine

Take any third-person sentence above and run it through all six persons aloud — videō, vidēs, videt, vidēmus, vidētis, vident — keeping the object the same. Six forms, one breath. The train window doesn't judge.

Vol. IV.a: Verbs That Lean on Verbs

Take the little club and pair each verb with an infinitive you know, in the third person singular and plural: legere solet / solent, venīre dēbet / dēbent, pugnāre audet / audent. Then negate one and give it an object — mūrēs coquere nōn solent. The aim is to stop seeing two verbs and start seeing one idea: “are-accustomed-to-cook” as a single unit with the person on the end. When the infinitive stops looking like a second verb and starts looking like the completion of the first, the construction is yours.

Vol. IV.b: The Word-Hoard

Cover the right-hand columns and work each table cold: Latin → literal sense → descendant. Then reverse it — start from the English word and dig down (ominous → ? fascinating → wait, that one's held back for Vol. VI.a's territory; sinister → ?). Ten minutes on a train covers the hoard. The pass condition: abominable, inauguration and fairy each traceable back to source without peeking.

Vol. V: Stone Latin

On the RIB website, search any site near you — Chichester, Bath, Silchester. Take one short stone. Expand the abbreviations, name the case of every noun, find the perfect verb. One stone per train journey is genuine reading of genuine Latin, which beats Caecilius and his garden by some distance.

Vol. VI: Whispered Latin

The Bath tablets are published as Tabellae Sulis and browsable via the RIB online corpus and the Roman Baths museum site. Pick one short tablet. Find: the dative of the goddess, the verb of giving, a seu-pair, a perfect, and — if you're lucky — a wish bending its vowel. Five finds per tablet. Then go and stand by the spring itself some weekend; it steams on regardless, and you'll be one of a small number of visitors who can read what was thrown in.

Vol. VI.a: Charm-craft

Three exercises, one per medium. Spoken: read Cato's reed-charm aloud three times without stumbling — harder than it looks, which is presumably part of the mystique. Written: take any word of about ten letters and build its diminishing triangle by hand; the act teaches the logic faster than any explanation. Read: parse the SATOR square cold, all five words with cases named. Then, when passing through the Cotswolds, the Corinium Museum holds Britain's copy — and the Roman Baths hold the tablets it kept company. Word-magic country is day-trip country.

Vol. VII: The Verb Workshop

Take Vol. IV's present-tense sentences and push each into the past twice: once as imperfect (vidēbat — was seeing), once as perfect (vīdit — saw, done). Saying both aloud for the same sentence is the fastest way to feel the aspect difference — and it's the exact muscle Spanish hablaba/hablé trains, if you ever want a second workout.

Vol. VII.a: The Druids, Through Roman Eyes

The three Caesar sentences are the workout: read each cold, find the signal verb, mark the reported clause, translate — then check the reveal. When dīcuntur… ēdiscere parses without effort, Vol. IX has effectively begun and may as well be unparked. For the field component: Anglesey still holds Llyn Cerrig Bach, the lake that yielded a great Iron Age votive hoard — plausibly the sanctuary's own treasury, now in Cardiff. The groves are gone; the lake kept the receipts.

Vol. VIII: The Time Machine

Three passes, train-sized. One: run mittō through all six tenses, third person, aloud — mittit, mittēbat, mittet, mīsit, mīserat, mīserit — until the two-stem seam is audible. Two: take any Vol. IV present-tense sentence and time-shift it through the whole system, six versions, one breath each. Three: the timestamp drill — build three sī… (future perfect), … (future) sentences of your own on the Silvianus pattern; if the logic of vīderis before dabis feels natural rather than fussy, the Roman habit of mind has taken.

Aside — the tense that worked. Horace closed his third book of Odes, around 23 BC, with a boast built from this volume's two halves: exēgī monumentum aere perennius — I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze (perfect: done, filed) — and then, switching tense to reach forward: nōn omnis moriar — I shall not wholly die. A perfect and a future, wagering that the poems would outlast the empire's metalwork. The bronze is largely gone; you have just read the future tense in question, still running, two thousand and fifty years on. As advertisements for grammar go, it has the advantage of having been checked.

Vol. VIII.a: The Passive Voice

Take the worked sentences from Vols IV and VII and flip each one, aloud, in both directions — active to passive and back. Mīles templum videt / templum ā mīlite vidētur, over and over, until the three-part swap happens without deliberation. Then push each flipped sentence through the tenses: vidētur, vidēbātur, vīsum est, vīsum erat. Saying the last two aloud is the fastest cure for the est trap, because your ear learns that the two-word forms sit in the past regardless of what sum appears to be doing.

For reading practice, Ørberg's chapter that introduces this is the right size of dose — he gives you the passive in the present tense only, which is the half that works by ending-swap. The participle-plus-sum half arrives later, and this volume is here for when it does.

See also: Vol. I — the case system for the ablative's range; Vol. III — adjective agreement for how the participle behaves; Vol. IV — the verb engine for the active endings this volume mirrors; Vol. V — stone Latin for the passive on inscriptions; Vol. VII — the verb workshop for the imperfect and the conative sense of cōnārī.

Vol. IX: The Reported World

Pure transformation work, ideal for the train. Take any sentence from Vols IV or VIII, prefix dīcit, and convert: subject to accusative, verb to infinitive. Then run the time dial — all three infinitives aloud. Then push the main verb into the past (dīxit) and feel the English translations slide while the Latin barely moves. Ten sentences at three settings each is thirty reps; when negat sē cēpisse comes out faster than its translation, the reported world is annexed.

Vol. X: The Unreal

Three graded passes. One: vowel-swap drill — take any Vol. IV present indicative and bend it (videt → videat, capit → capiat), saying both aloud; the drill of the curse tablets, now understood. Two: the free forms — infinitive + endings, ten verbs, imperfect then pluperfect (mittere → mitterem; mīsisse → mīsissem). Three: the regret machine — build three sī… vīssem/-issem sentences about your own week; if one of them is about a missing ring, the library will consider its work done. The main sequence now runs 0 to X, and every mood, tense and case in Romano-British stone, lead and ink is on the shelf behind you.

Lectiōnēs — Lectiō I: A Letter from the Edge of the World

Read the three lines aloud once for sound, once for sense. Then find, without looking back: the dative of the recipient, the three words all agreeing in the accusative (ad diem nātālem meum), and the one bent-vowel subjunctive. Three finds. If you can say why veniās isn’t venīs, you’ve met the subjunctive on friendly terms — which is the best way to meet it before the grammar volume makes it formal.

Lectiō II — The Ring of Senicianus

Read the tablet cold from the capitals — no reveals — and make the five finds: dative god, verb of giving, perfect, subjunctive wish, one wobble. Then do the same for the ring's five words: vocative, subjunctive, formula. When both run smoothly, the field trip is the final stage: The Vyne for the ring, Lydney for the lead, in either order. Stand in front of the ring and read it aloud, quietly. You will be addressing a suspected thief by name in the vocative, sixteen centuries after his accuser did the same — and the curse, remember, was renewed and never lifted.

Lectiō — Aurōra: a small book for first light

Step outside and stand still for a minute. The Romans gave the morning a goddess; the least we can do is turn up.

Salvē, diēs.