Learning to spot and understand basic phrases quickly is a direct path to fluency in any foreign language. It defines a natural and essential stage in language acquisition, one in which students get not only those particular phrases but vitally important insights into how the language works. Joachim Mueller's modest list of more than 1300 phrases from Cicero offers students a way to handle many different turns of phrase, usages, and expressions, including those that are proverbial and technical. It also presents much essential vocabulary that will reinforce or extend what students already know. Teachers can use such a list as Mueller’s as a diagnostic to test how much students have learned, and also as a basis for further vocabulary expansion. (For example: Voce contendo can be understood as "I raise my voice." What are the other typical uses of the verb contendo?) Most importantly, study of these phrases brings home the important insight that "Latin is not merely English in a coded form." Latin has its own genius, its own way of putting things. Its words do not exactly correspond to the range of meanings of a parallel set of English words. Of course, simply attending to how Latinists have interpreted some otherwise baffling expressions is quite valuable, as is deliberately focusing on the meanings of the technical and proverbial expressions that tend to recur in the writings of an author like Cicero. That is part of what is made possible with this libellus. But it is above all a convenient, accessible way to begin learning the meanings and usage of the words involved. For an ampler approach to Latin phraseology focused on the all-important particle-words, see Particularly Good Latin, based on the labors of Thomas Dyche, with debts to William Walker.
