quoting Nessari:

quoting Matrix:

quoting Nessari:

Point. Matrix, have you never read a shitty Teach Yourself LANGUAGE book?

Correct.

So you're saying you've never read a shitty language-teaching book? Seriously? I find that very hard to believe.

To be fair, we know that most language-teaching books are shitty, and if you've never read a good one you may just be consigned to believe that that's just the way language-teaching books are.

Yeah, the first decent language textbook I ever looked at was Wheelock's. Unfortunately, the demands of textbook publishers are such that Wheelock's gets filled with more and more superfluous nonsense with every passing edition, but it's second to none if you know what to ignore. Now, what I wouldn't give to have Wheelock's Sanskrit...

(Maybe I'll write one someday...)

Could we maybe turn this into a proper featured article, one that has several approved editors?

Latin for Americans > Wheelock's imo

Sengoídelc: Old Irish for Beginners by David Stifter

It's difficult. You get some good background, and a great amount of Old Irish example sentences, a lot from real sources, but it piles on the information quickly and the transcription for phonetic stuff is difficult to read (using non-standard Greek letters to represent phonemes, instead of IPA symbols). There's a lot of reconstruction examples of Proto-Celtic through to Old Irish, which is nice, but maybe unnecessary for true beginners.

I'm sure if you have the patience to get through the density of the first few chapters, it'll be a great resource, but otherwise, it's an awkward read. (and it's about as massive as Wheelock's Latin).

This textbook does dick you around.