I think that is a great way to learn the declensions, as long as you are able to do it with other words too. When you just use one word, you might remember to add the ending, but you might forget where to put them (where the noun stem is).
Since word order can't always be relied upon, is this simply an "art" that's learned with practice, of distinguishing the ambiguities? I assume, like English, sometimes it's simply difficult to resolve the ambiguities, no matter how comfortable you are with the language.
Usually the case ambiguities work themselves out after you have read the entire sentence. This will be more confusing if you jump around your sentences instead of reading them from start to finish. There is a great article on how to read Latin, but I can't seem to find it at the moment. Usually, there is just one interpretation of any given text that actually makes good sense. If you can provide examples, we can show how those ambiguities are solved.
For pronunciation, I've found a number of sources on the web with recordings in MP3 format (some I've found from this forum). I'm a bit confused, though. The books I have (Wheelock's Latin and Reading Latin by Jones & Sidwell) both state the the latin 'v', as a consonant is pronounced like an English 'w' but almost all the recordings I've heard have a very english 'v'-like pronunciation. Are these incorrect or is the sound more of a cross between v and w?
The Latin V definitely did not sound like the English V. Some people prefer to pronounce Latin as English because it is true that we will never know exactly how it sounded.
The Latin V must have sounded somewhat like English W, but it is most likely that it was pronounced, at least by some people, somewhat like a B. This is not hard to believe, since the V of some other languages sounds a lot like a B. You can see this in certain Latin writings, where words normally spelled with a V have been misspelled with a B. For another example, the verb ferveo, fervere
has the third principal part ferbui
, where did that B come from? It is kind of difficult to make a sound between W and B (it actually sounds a lot like V), but that is probably close to the Latin V.
flebile nescio quid queritur lyra, flebile lingua murmurat exanimis, respondent flebile ripae