Since I converted I have been wanting to brush up my very rusty Latin - 5 years at school plus a year of reading Cicero and poetry with a friend while at University. So recently I bought myself the Primer of Eccliastical Latin and was most perturbed to find how the declensions are presented. In my youth in Britain it was: Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Geneitive, Dative, Ablative. In the Primer it is Nom, Gen, Dat, Acc, Abl with no Vocative.

Now, I realise it is not that important but the order I learnt is now totally ingrained in me. No matter, I will just do the brushing up of the very basic grammar from my old textbooks and then jump in the primer stuff once that is past. I presume that there is no difference between classical and later Latin when it concerns basic grammar?

But I am curious, is this particular order for presenting the declensions of nouns standard in the USA? It is amazing how resistant my brain is to accepting any other format than mensa, mensa, mensam, mensae, mensae, mensa and mensae,mensae, mensas, mensarum mensis,mensis.

I think the order of cases is also observed in classical Latin, too. But I don't really care which order to follow.

To be fair, the author of the Primer of the Ecclesiastical Latin does mention the vocative case and the locative case of these nouns on pages 154 and 137-138 respectively. Both these cases are considered as "minor" (see page 7).

The classical Latin also has the Instrumental case, which appears in few adverbs.

I like NAGDAV personally...

N
Acc.
G
D
Abl.
V

I guess it all depends on how you've already memorized it. But, whatever way you start, make sure you keep the same format as you go; otherwise jogging the memory is extremely harder. (I memorized the 1st and 2nd declension nouns as NGDAA, the other declensions I memorized as NAGDAV. This has become a pain.

(I'm still a beginner at this latin stuff...)