MY BUCKET LIST
add “the” to every entry for nouns. I know that translations to English don’t always need the definite article. It’s to facilitate learning: one can spot the difference between adjectives and nouns much more quickly. should be done. Plz report where I failed.
Long term goal. Some entries are confusing. Entries are supposed to be unambiguous. For similar words, I will add hints like [not x, not y] to the English definition.
Please report errors and comment on the course.
Hi Robert-Alexander, Thank you so much for making all these Latin courses! Is the 5000 words course the amalgamation of the series 101-117? Or is it a different list?
Also I have an error from 101 Cambridge course, the word “Assidue” is missing a translation. Is there a course forum for your other courses? I can post errors as I find them somewhere.
I am about to become a Latin teacher so your vocabulary courses are amazing while I am reading Caesar this summer. Also, is the Cambridge 101 list the vocabulary from the entire Cambridge Latin course?
Have a nice day!
It’s completely different. The 101-117 contains many obscure textbook words that may not among the 5000 most common words. I switched over to the 5000 words course, because I feel that this better represents the vocabulary in a wide range of Latin texts. Plus it has audio. It’s maybe a bit robotic but words stick better with audio. Use the syllables (alaways level 1) to learn more.
No there’s no separate course forum. Use this forum in case you want to report errors. I stopped putting much work in the 01-17 series because there are only few learners and I consider the 5000 course to be superior. I’ll add you as an admin. Then you can correct this mistake by yourself.
Yes I guess so. It’s from the excellent Haverford’s tool (see syllabus). Thus the American version. Like described in the syllabus, I omitted Cambridge words that are in some of the basic Latin words lists, like those by DCC and Diederich ( See syllabus for details). But there are other excellent Memrise courses that list all Cambridge Latin words. And 102 doesn’t repeat words already known from 101, and so forth. Thus advanced courses tend to shrink in size.
Syllabus: Level 1 - Syllabus - Latin Intermediate Vocabulary 101 (Cambridge) - Memrise
Thanks for your responses, Robert-Alexander. I think you’ve convinced me to switch to the 5000 word course now. I am already 300 or so words into “Essential Latin” based on the Diederich 1400 word vocabulary (https://www.memrise.com/course/667484/essential-latin-vocabulary-5/). If I’m reading your syllabus and lemma buckets correctly, I believe could finish that course and begin your 5000 word course around #6 (this would be 83.6%) or #7 and only repeat a small number of words. Or perhaps there is a strong case to trying the audio now for retention and simply repeating those words.
Just curious, are you a scholar?
I’m not a scholar. I’m certainly not an expert. My only experience with Latin comes from my time in school (5 years Latin in a German grammar school). However, I’m confident that the course is correct to a great extent as I used reliable sources. But there is certainly some glitches. So, I am thankful for any user feedback.
My course is supposed to contain all Diederich words. Diederich’s core list ist about 1500 words. So Diederich’s core words are certainly among the first 1800 words or so. [I have extensive statistical data gathered by John Dee that I could provide to you] However, some words even in the top 1500 are from Lodge’s list exclusively or are medieval words omitted by Diederich in his core list. So I’m not sure which and how many (potentially important) words you gonna miss when pursuing your plan to start at level 7.
I don’t know how important audio is to you. Some users switch it off completely. I like audio. It makes the otherwise quite boring course a bit more vivid, adds some variation to test types, and helps me to retain words. I know that this audio is a bit robotic, but it’s fairly nice classical reconstructed pronouncing, that obeys classical vocal length and emphasized syllables. Not all like this pronunciation style. Some like a more Italian/ecclestical style or even other styles like the “German school pronounciation”. Some don’t see a point pronouncing Latin at all…
Hi Robert-Alexander,
Thanks for the great Latin course. I noticed one small error in level 1:
socius, i (m) = ally, confederate, but the attribute (Part of Speech) indicated is adjective, not masculine noun. An easy mistake to make because if I recall ‘socius’ is also an adjective.
Gingersmom
It’s n now n2m. Thank you very much. Wouldn’t have found it without your notice. Thx
How did you obtain and include the translations?
Plz. see my sources https://www.memrise.com/course/1480193/5000-most-frequent-latin-words-audio/23/ ( section “Sources for adding Macrons, English Definitions, Parts of Speech and general Validation”). Translations sometimes differ among these sources. I tried to validate translations and find common ground using the stated sources.
Or do you speak of the technical process? Excel(or Google Docs) is very helpful here to come up with a first draft for the course by combining the various sources I found… But it needed much, much, much manual corrections.
Thanks for the course!
The words interim and interea have exactly the same clue:
interim - “meanwhile; (lit.) there between”.
interea - “meanwhile; (lit.) there between”.
Since Memrise likes to show both at the sametimes it’s just a guessing game to select the correct one. Thanks!
Thank you very much for your suggestion. This is a general issue with this course. There are too many too similar words. Your example shows a very extreme case, but there are many words that are too hard to differentiate. One useful hint is the Part of Speech. POS often help, but not in extreme cases like interea, interim (and btw interdum). Please see my first post in this thread: I’ll try to mitigate these issues over time. In the cold, dark and long European winter I’ll have some time to tackle this problem systematically. For now; I’ve edited the three entries in question:
sometimes, occasionally 1. meanwhile, in the meantime 2. nevertheless, notwithstanding [not interim] meanwhile, in the meantime [not intereā]Thx again for your support and feedback.
Greetings from Germany
Thanks and greetings from Brazil!
Thanks for putting this course together! Any chance you could create a clone that allows spelling questions?
Hi bookbuyeriv,
thank you very much. I’m currently not planning a Latin typing course. However, I can provide you with all the data necessary to fork this course (if you don’t know how to do this by yourself). Two or threee things to contemplate:
If you’re willing to do this, give me a go anf I’ll provide you with the links to me most current data.
Dear Robert,
Thanks for getting back to me! Hadn’t realized how much work it would be… If I ever end up having the time, I’ll reach out!
Best, Peter
Just started using this course and absolutely love it. It is so useful (I am using an all-typing script with it too which helps). I did, however, wonder whether there was any reason why you didn’t expand out the words in full (signum, signi for example rather than just signum, i) - that would seem to tally better with the audio too. I was also wondering whether there was any way to add further attributes or details (highlighting which verbs tend to take the dative, for instance).
Well, that’s just how I was used to be presented with vocab in Latin. It think that’s pretty much the standard approach. It’s shorter (obviously) which has some benefits on smaller screens. Plus, it makes pattern recognition super easy: declension and conjunction class are visible at first sight. (PS: sometimes the audio reflects short versions).
Yeah, sure. One could add another column (which is unfortunately only displayed when clicking on it) or you could add this to the English column too. I thought about sth. like that and tested it, but I decided not to do that. I mean, it doesn’t stop here: some verbs (most verbs?) can go with different cases and maybe change meaning ever so slightly in the process. That’s just too convoluted for such a simple course design (and too much too handle for such a simple app/website - better go full Anki then). Overall I felt, that it hampered the learning process. As you might have guessed, I also included only the most common meanings and kept the course simple. A full typing course (which I won’t create - see comments above) might be OK with more information per entry. This information is difficult to gather anyway. Check out DCC’s list which includes some of the more surprising case demands: Dickinson College Commentaries But usually only a few vocab lists I have come across bother with listing all cases that go along with each verb. I’d recommend understanding the function and purpose of each case - the rest comes quite naturally. Have I included information on the case demanded by prepositions? I guess I did for the most part and the most frequent prepositions at leasr! That’s the real problem btw. These cases are sometimes kind of unpredictable (even for Germans - cf. below).
Plus, I hate to break it to you, the case of the object demanded by the verb is usually very intuitive to me. Why is that? Well, I’m German and German is mirroring the Latin case system for the most part. If a Latin verb demands an accusative object, it’s usually an accusative in German too (I guess the same is true for slavic languages). Now, that’s perhaps not very satisfactory to you, but it explains for sure why I didn’t care that much about information on cases …