Some might wonder why I recommend Lingua Latina instead of Fr. William Most’s Latin by the Natural Method series. Though Fr. Most was a friend of Catholic Culture and a brilliant theologian, after having used both books my opinion is that Most’s Latin style is significantly inferior to and less enjoyable than Ørberg’s. For example, Ørberg early on begins to acclimatize the student to the more flexible word order that makes Latin so different from English, exposure to which is essential for true reading fluency. Most’s Latin is, especially at the beginning, clunky and tedious in order to be didactic; the brilliance of Ørberg is that he manages to be didactic for the beginner while also being fluid and clever in his writing. Yet despite his greater didacticism, Fr. Most relies on English explanations of the Latin grammar, whereas Ørberg accomplishes his task entirely in Latin. Ørberg also has illustrations to teach the meaning of words without translation. Fr. Most does not include macrons to indicate vowel length, which is essential to learn correct pronunciation. He does include stress marks, which Ørberg does not, but the rules of stress are more easily learnt without stress marks than syllable length without macrons.