nymia: I found Frederic Wheelock's Latin book to be very helpful; he gives straightforward grammar explanations (mostly in tables) followed by very interesting and memorable classical quotations. This is a very traditional way of teaching Latin, and I enjoyed reading that a lot, even though my class was using the more "modern" Ecce Romani.

It is necessary to memorize a huge number of inflections, although I can't say I could ever do all 144 finite forms (more or less) of any verb outside the first conjugation. (In addition, there are a few non-finite forms, not just the infinitive.) Traditionally, people would just recite those until they memorized them: puella puellae puellae puellam puella, puellae puellarum puellis puellas puellis. (Or "a ae ae am a, ae arum is as is; us i o um o, i orum is os is...")

Hey, at least it's easier than Greek, which has over 600 finite verb forms (especially if you learn the archaic duals, which I never did).

If you want to see lots of examples of conjugation, you may appreciate the Barron's book 201 Latin Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses, recently (1995) re-issued as 501 Latin Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses. But if you don't like inflections, that's probably the last thing you want to see.

LWCE

I'm going to be at LWCE in the Linuxcare booth on Thursday the 17th in the afternoon, and I'll be at the show wandering around in the morning.