Alex Jones prepared two Latin primers for several generations of Latin students. The grammar has everything you need to know in 55 tight pages, while the vocab guide lists the 1000 most common words and also has a pronunciation guide. 1000 words is the minimum necessary to achieve some degree of fluency in reading, and can be internalized over a couple of months of diligent practice, a fact that took me about five years to discover. In the era before LLMs or even online dictionaries that parsed word endings, a compact primer was the essential bridge between the text, the new student, and the dictionary.

Why learn Latin? So you can read the classics in the same language as Julius Caesar, and so you can be prepared when the Vesuvius Project 10xes the volume of available Latin literature. Prepare yourself!

Listen to the pronunciation guide.