Latin Study Habits Book

At a meeting with one of my teachers, she sort of accidentally suggested that I write a Latin study habits book (an explanation would require background info, so I won't go there.) Since I learned rather quickly (mostly independently skipping Latin II and III and then doing well on the AP test in Latin IV), I thought my habits must've been pretty good, so it would be a decent idea.

I'm not positive what exactly to write about, however. There's noun declension, which is unfortunately hard to do without blunt memorization, verb conjugation, which is somewhat similar but I can make some alternative suggestions, there's vocabulary, which teachers never seem to understand how to teach, there's translation strategies in general, which for some, teachers do a decent job of. Any other suggestions?

I'm not completely sure what such a guide would look like, but one habit I picked up in my coursework was to keep a vocabulary notebook. Whenever you run across a word you didn't know or had to look up, you write it down with the definition in a notebook. This is done whether or not you should have already "learned" the word; if you need to look it up, you need to write it down.

It sounds simple but it really reinforced vocabulary; writing it down was obviously a reinforcer, but so was a periodic review of my notebook. I remember at one time I had written the word adipiscor five times in a three page span, and to this day can instantly recall the other principal parts -i, adeptus and the fact it means "to get, obtain, advantage oneself".

Patterns in the forms of noun/verb declensions are always good to point out, but regarding syntactical grammar I've always felt a general understanding of what the cases represented is important. For example, a beginner crutch for the ablative is that its the "by/with/from" case; try one of these prepositions with the ablativce word you have and see if it allows the word to "fit" in the sentence. Similarly, the dative is the "to/for" case. These are only crutches to be sure--you don't really get the ablative until you improve your understanding of concepts like instrumentality, description, accompaniment, and the like (all concepts that can be expressed in English via "with")--but they can be useful.

A book I would like to see is a latin version of a series of fantastic grammar books called Grammaire en clair ( at least the French one is) There is a version for spanish, german etc. Look at a copy in a bookshop to see what I mean, but basically each book is a series of ( excellent) cartoons strips with the dialogue themed on one point of grammar.... personal pronouns, the future tense, whatever..... and then lots of consolidation and extension exercises. In my humble view these are really interesting and motivational books. If I had the expertise I would do it myself. Go to a good bookshop and look them up, you might be impressed. The writers have been most ingenious in thinking up a ( usually funny) storyline to suit the grammar theme. In the French one, the subjunctive page is a hoot...literally.