Help with D'Ooge readng material

I'm currently working through Latin for Beginners by D'Ooge and I'm having trouble with some of the reading material.

There are two sentences causing me difficulty:

Dī grave supplicium sūmmit de malīs, sed iī quī lēgibus deōrum pārent, etiam post mortem cūrantur. Illa vīta dīs erat grātissima quae hominibus miserīs ūtilissima fuerat.

I get a (very rough) translation as follows:

The goods give heavy punishment to the wicked, but those who obey the wicked, but those who submit to the legions of the gods are taken care of even after death. That life which had been ended by wretched men was most pleasing to the gods

Is anyone able to give me some pointers?

1. sumere supplicium de is an idiomatic phrase, meaning "to inflict upon".

2. The nominative of legibus is not legio.

3. The last sentence is testing your knowledge of the dative case. There is no word there meaning "had been ended". Keep the relative clause separate from the main clause ("That life was...which...").

Hope this helps. And if it does, post your revised translation! :)

Certainly does help - some of what I translated last night doesn't even make sense to me now!

So revised translation:

The gods inflict heavy punishment on the wicked, but those who obey the laws of the gods, even after death are taken care of. That life was pleasing to the gods which had been most useful to wretched men

May I ask why you picked D'Ooge as your introductory textbook?

Sure.

D'Ooge wasn't actually the first text I used. I worked all the way through Getting Started with Latin: Beginning Latin for Homeschoolers and Self-Taught Students of Any Age, which was a very good introductory text, but it was also very basic (just covered the A and O declensions nouns & adjectives and the first and second conjugations (indicative active present only). I've been using D'Ooge in combination with the Cambridge Latin Course, but I find the Cambridge course lacks a bit of structure and is not at all helpful with grammar.

I hadn't really had trouble with D'Ooge at all until I struck the reading material in the back and, to be honest, it was mostly because I tackled it when I was too tired and obviously made some really basic mistakes - for example, I'd convinced myself hominibus miserīs was in the ablative and tried to work the sentence around that, forgot that lex was the normative of legibus, and somehow ended up adding in a clause in the first sentence that wasn't there at all!

I suppose I still haven't answered why I picked D'Oooge in the first place. The answer is that it was really one of the first I came across and it was free. I have/had considered switching to Wheelock, but I've heard so many conflicting reviews of that text that I'm not sure whether it would be worth picking it up now that I've got so far with D'Ooge.

I teach Latin 102 at UNC and we use Wheelock - I'm not sure if that's because it's really *better* so much as it seems to be the favorite of the dept. chair. Wheelock should probably be subtitled "Latin via Cicero" since 80% of the sample sentences originate with him.

Wheelock is very useful if you're doing it on your own because you can make a case to Harper Collins to provide you with their answer keys to both the text and the workbook. I know they provide the keys to tutors, not just instructors.

My friends who teach Latin at the high school level use Ecce because the stories are more fun.

Yeah I used Wheelock's Latin when I was doing "intro Latin" at university. We used some old textbook back when I was in high school, but I don't remember much about that one other than I think the cover was pink.