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Minimus: Starting out in Latin
A lively introduction to Latin for children aged 7 and over. Join in the fun with Minimus - a mix of myths, stories, grammar support and historical background! This audio CD provides help with Latin pronunciation and contains lively readings of the Latin text to help motivate pupils.
Audio CD
First published September 2, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
November 26, 2015
The historical information is OK I suppose probably worth two stars for that part of it, but this averages out to 1 with the Latin content.
Subjecting kids to Latin grammar at such an early age is tantamount to child abuse (the pain starts on page 4). Kids at this age don't need grammar analysis fed into their language acquisition devices, they pick it up intuitively if you give them enough comprehensible examples by way of input. However, what CI is in here is squeezed mercilessly between history sections which exist simply because long dead Romans are so far removed from kids' 21st century experience that it's necessary to teach history in a language book.
The Latinists did get some of the pedagogic memo - kids love animals. Great, but they still expect students to go from here to the absolutely horrendous Cambridge Latin Course which tortures kids until they develop psychological scars.
Please - learn a modern language instead (maybe even one based on Latin; French, Spanish or Italian) - it's more fun and is potentially useful - you really can't take the kids on holiday to ancient Rome, and nor will they ever have to conduct a future business meeting with Flavius of Vindolanda. And they can still learn the names of their favourite animals. Hooray for animals!
Finally, if you really must teach them a language that no-one speaks, teach them Esperanto, which taught with up-to-date pedagogic methods can at least help them see how fantastic modern languages can be, rather than Latin which puts people off languages with its inanely backwards traditionalist grammar-translation instruction.
Subjecting kids to Latin grammar at such an early age is tantamount to child abuse (the pain starts on page 4). Kids at this age don't need grammar analysis fed into their language acquisition devices, they pick it up intuitively if you give them enough comprehensible examples by way of input. However, what CI is in here is squeezed mercilessly between history sections which exist simply because long dead Romans are so far removed from kids' 21st century experience that it's necessary to teach history in a language book.
The Latinists did get some of the pedagogic memo - kids love animals. Great, but they still expect students to go from here to the absolutely horrendous Cambridge Latin Course which tortures kids until they develop psychological scars.
Please - learn a modern language instead (maybe even one based on Latin; French, Spanish or Italian) - it's more fun and is potentially useful - you really can't take the kids on holiday to ancient Rome, and nor will they ever have to conduct a future business meeting with Flavius of Vindolanda. And they can still learn the names of their favourite animals. Hooray for animals!
Finally, if you really must teach them a language that no-one speaks, teach them Esperanto, which taught with up-to-date pedagogic methods can at least help them see how fantastic modern languages can be, rather than Latin which puts people off languages with its inanely backwards traditionalist grammar-translation instruction.
June 8, 2013
Minimus Pupils Book – Starting out in Latin
Barbara Bell (author)
Helen Forte (Illustrator)
In this text book Minimus is a small mouse who guides the reader through the basics of the Latin language. It may be asked, what is the point of teaching a “dead” language to our children in 2013? However, the learning of Latin can be seen as a bridge into learning about ancient history, classic mythology and fables. Latin is also widely used in the medical profession, law, agriculture and zoology and is the base for many modern European languages and there is a growing interest in the leaning of Latin. Minimus is a mouse in Roman Britain living in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall. The book does not shrink from issues of death, war and slavery that were at the fore in this period of history. Minimus leads the reader (KS2), via well illustrated cartoons, in learning the roots of the Latin language. This is done via a series of activities that can be completed as a group or individually. In doing this, Minimus restates several components of English grammar and therefore the teacher can use this book to reinforce English language teaching. The book pinpoints the roots of English words still in current usage, derived from the Latin. The book makes the learning of Latin accessible, there is a corresponding teacher’s book and the pupil can progress to Minimus Secundus for further Latin learning.
Barbara Bell (author)
Helen Forte (Illustrator)
In this text book Minimus is a small mouse who guides the reader through the basics of the Latin language. It may be asked, what is the point of teaching a “dead” language to our children in 2013? However, the learning of Latin can be seen as a bridge into learning about ancient history, classic mythology and fables. Latin is also widely used in the medical profession, law, agriculture and zoology and is the base for many modern European languages and there is a growing interest in the leaning of Latin. Minimus is a mouse in Roman Britain living in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall. The book does not shrink from issues of death, war and slavery that were at the fore in this period of history. Minimus leads the reader (KS2), via well illustrated cartoons, in learning the roots of the Latin language. This is done via a series of activities that can be completed as a group or individually. In doing this, Minimus restates several components of English grammar and therefore the teacher can use this book to reinforce English language teaching. The book pinpoints the roots of English words still in current usage, derived from the Latin. The book makes the learning of Latin accessible, there is a corresponding teacher’s book and the pupil can progress to Minimus Secundus for further Latin learning.
xx-dnf-skim-reference
July 15, 2020Iff you really want to learn some bit of Latin, and iff you have other materials to help you, this could be great. But it really does seem like a supplementary story for homework, and one would really need a main text, an exercise book, a dictionary, and, preferably, an instructor.
March 27, 2025
I'll start by saying that I'm in no way the target demographic of this book, that is, a child who is probably learning this in a Latin course during their basic education. However, after struggling with motivation to follow orderly methods of Latin, I'd say that this has helped a lot, just as much as the second book, 'Minimus Secundus', has. The audio tracks, though very adorable in nature, and spoken by anglophone Latin pupils, aren't what I would recommend as one's first contact with Latin phonology, given it is severely affected by the pupils' - and their teachers' - native English pronunciation. The cultural insights provided by the book and the fables and tales present at the end of each lesson are also tremendously helpful in better understanding Roman and Greek culture.
March 7, 2019
A great resource for young learners. This book allows primary school children to get to grips with the basics of the language. With comic strip stories based on real artifacts found at the roman fort of vindalanda in northumbria it also give the kids real insigt into aspects of roman life and culture. Each chapter contains bite size chunks of grammar and vocabulary with engaging illustration. Roman myths are also incorparated into the story so kids learn about icarus and Medusa etc as they go along. The course is engaging and challenging without being overwhelming and there are a huge amount of support materials availible online.
April 16, 2019
Great book to start learning latin :)
October 28, 2020
Spent the year going through this with my eight year old. This is a great way to get started.
Loved it.
Loved it.
June 16, 2021
fifth grade flashbacks ayoo
February 14, 2022
Yikes.
Helpful for learning latin.
Really don't know why I decided to start though.
Helpful for learning latin.
Really don't know why I decided to start though.
December 13, 2022
Look no further if you want a Latin-loving child
For at least a century Latin has come under withering attack for irrelevance to the modern world. As most embarking on study of the language are primary school children, the most devastating have been those addressing the child's point of view, perhaps best encapsulated in the film Young Winston, where the eight-year-old future Prime Minister is sternly ordered by his new headmaster to learn the declension of Mensa. His curiosity is momentarily piqued by the vocative case ("But why would I want to talk to a table?" he reasonably asks), and is immediately crushed by the furious and totally unsatisfying reaction.
If you are open to considering the value of Latin for its beauty, its grammatical discipline, the insights it offers into English and other modern European languages, its power to put you in touch with centuries of Europeans for whom it was the lingua franca and to permit you to hear without interpretation the voices of yet earlier voices of fascinating people, then Minimus is the perfect antidote to the preceding critique for your child.
The most powerful testimony I can offer to the magical ability of Minimus to bring Latin to life for children is to point out that I used it to introduce my home-schooled sons to the language before sending them around the age of eleven to preparatory schools where I knew their peers would have some knowledge of it. In all three cases, Minimus's trick of bringing Latin to life with its colloquialism, wit and fascinatingly honest and unpatronising insights into a very different world captivated my children to the extent that they entered enthusiastically into the hard slog that then followed from more traditional primers and went on to make Latin for many years their top subject by far outshining their classmates in it. Thank you, Barbara Bell!
Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander's Choice, a novel about an Eton boy enthused by the classics, https://www.amazon.com/dp/191457107X
For at least a century Latin has come under withering attack for irrelevance to the modern world. As most embarking on study of the language are primary school children, the most devastating have been those addressing the child's point of view, perhaps best encapsulated in the film Young Winston, where the eight-year-old future Prime Minister is sternly ordered by his new headmaster to learn the declension of Mensa. His curiosity is momentarily piqued by the vocative case ("But why would I want to talk to a table?" he reasonably asks), and is immediately crushed by the furious and totally unsatisfying reaction.
If you are open to considering the value of Latin for its beauty, its grammatical discipline, the insights it offers into English and other modern European languages, its power to put you in touch with centuries of Europeans for whom it was the lingua franca and to permit you to hear without interpretation the voices of yet earlier voices of fascinating people, then Minimus is the perfect antidote to the preceding critique for your child.
The most powerful testimony I can offer to the magical ability of Minimus to bring Latin to life for children is to point out that I used it to introduce my home-schooled sons to the language before sending them around the age of eleven to preparatory schools where I knew their peers would have some knowledge of it. In all three cases, Minimus's trick of bringing Latin to life with its colloquialism, wit and fascinatingly honest and unpatronising insights into a very different world captivated my children to the extent that they entered enthusiastically into the hard slog that then followed from more traditional primers and went on to make Latin for many years their top subject by far outshining their classmates in it. Thank you, Barbara Bell!
Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander's Choice, a novel about an Eton boy enthused by the classics, https://www.amazon.com/dp/191457107X
September 8, 2008
Minimus is a fun Latin course for grammar age children. It's an immersion course, so I'd highly recommend adding grammar chants, or a program such as Latina Christiana. The teachers manual for Minimus is expensive, but worth purchasing.
March 16, 2015
This book is great for my 8 year old daughter. She has a great interest in learning Latin and the Romans. This book contains a mix of learning Latin (using comic strips and luanguage translations and Stories from the Roman era.
She has had the book 24 hours and has learned so much all ready.
She has had the book 24 hours and has learned so much all ready.
December 8, 2017
didnt really finish this - but I'm probably done reading it.
Its excellent - and I'd highly recommend it for anyone at any age embarking on a study of Latin.
Very good - even better than the text book I was using... and it was a good text book
Its excellent - and I'd highly recommend it for anyone at any age embarking on a study of Latin.
Very good - even better than the text book I was using... and it was a good text book
November 15, 2009
A fun intro to Latin.
September 8, 2011
Minimus is a highly engaging, fun story about a family with a cat and a mouse. I would recommend it to anyone interested in learning Latin.
March 8, 2015
A good book to use for quick review or getting a child interested in latin by focusing on spoken latin.
April 18, 2015
A must for your kids. Unless you are sending them to a classical read school, you have to home-school this information.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews