>>24660034
>>24659244
If you want to understand the value of the text's method, compare this to another book, like CLC (see the picture from my previous post), where it gives you a word bank and this very short text to practice the vocabulary with before moving onto the next chapter and the next word bank. The bulk of the chapter is an English article about Roman houses. The only other Latin in this chapter is from the captioned pictures that precede it (and they must expect you to "induce" the basic meaning from the pictures alone, because the vocabulary hasn't been introduced yet). Most other textbooks are like this. Even Most's "Latin by the Natural Method" is heavily reliant on word banks.

Wheelock's is similar in that it has a vocabulary list for each chapter, then a bunch of translation exercises (mostly a waste of time, IMO) and minimal reading material, and of limited value. For example, it has "sententiae antiquae," a short list of individual sentences without context, supposedly adapted from Roman authors. Despite being a fat book, it hardly does anything to develop reading skills (the actual skill most people are trying to learn), and the choice of exercises and readings can instill the harmful habit of "reading" by translation, and then, when completed, the textbook dumps the student into texts that are too difficult, encouraging the student to translate everything in order to cope with their inability to understand it. The point is that a student can spend months diligently working through the textbook and finding at the end of it that, other than having a basic overview of Latin grammar, for all the work they put into the exercises, they actually accomplished very little practically speaking.