The most obvious difference between languages is words. As you have seen, the really big difference between languages is syntax, which is not so obvious. You can look up words in the dictionary, but without knowledge of the way a language uses those words to create sentences, they're just words. The goal of this book is to teach you how Latin works. Once you know that, you'll be able to do something with the words you look up.

Latin's vocabulary isn't very large, only around 10,000 words. That may seem like a lot, but compared to English's quarter million (give or take), it's nothing. On top of that is the fact that a great many of those words are the results of mixing and matching bases, prefixes, and suffixes. Master the elements and you're home free.