--- In norse_course@egroups.com, "Haukur Thorgeirsson"
<falconsword@...> wrote:

> In the meantime I wonder if any of you have
> ideas on what kind of course you would prefer,
> technique, structure, speed etc.
> All suggestions and tips are welcome.

My experience in teaching Latin to Americans tells me that most of us
here in the US don't have a clue about grammar -- most people have a
hard time understanding what an indirect object is, much less what
cases should be used to represent a particular part of speech. It
comes of most Americans being "linguistically crippled", i.e., never
learning any other language than English.

I've worked in the past with the E.V. Gordon Old Norse textbook, and I
found it much more difficult in approach than any of the Latin classes
I'd taken. I understand that there are better textbooks available,
however I haven't seen one yet. Most Latin courses begin with one
noun form and one verb form, and work with these through a sample
reading/translation exercise. Then additional concepts are added, such
as accusative case, prepositions, objects of prepositions. And at
each step a new exercise utilizing the new concepts is translated.

Of course, Latin has the advantage that it has been being
systematically taught for centuries to those who were not native
speakers of the language, and thus you would reasonably expect that
trial and error would have yielded a good means of accomplishing this
by now ;-)

I look forward to the course start.