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 …
No problem - thanks for the very thorough explanation! And apologies if I came across as ungrateful. The course is an absolute gift regardless (and, being familiar with German myself, I very much agree on the cases - that intuition has to come through exposure). The other courses (on the formation of the verbs, nouns, and pronouns) are also exceptionally useful and I will be recommending them to my students in the future.
Nah. People have questions about the course concept before committing to such a Herculean task like learning 5000 words. I really enjoy questions and recommendations. In the past, feedback often helped to improve the course. (I could always provide you with my database so that you could start your own course and design it differently.) Thanks again. 
Thank you! I do actually have a question there - I have downloaded the course to Anki (just in case Memrise goes out of business or something), but I really valued the audio files you used for the course. Unfortunately for rejigging/creating a new course, the audio files are all scrambled when downloaded to Anki as far as I can see and aren’t named. Would there be any way you could provide me with the audio files you used? Don’t worry if not or if it is too much effort,
I only have the audio files scrambled myself. Cause, well, I did the same Anki export/import process you did. Here’s what you do (I hope I remember that correctly - did it for an entirely different course): you export the Anki database to CSV file and open that file in Excel (Google Sheets works exceptionally well too). Add a new column and auto fill-in the row number (0001,0002,0003…5000). Now, you need to find the column where the audio ID is stored. That’s a bit cryptic though. Entries with more than one media file have comma (or semicolon) separated audio ID. Split those based on the separator you’ve identified (that’s the =SPLIT() formula). Now, compare the audio file names in your mp3 Anki folder and the cryptic audio ID in your spreadsheet. You need to get rid of everything that is not that core number used in the mp3 filenames. I can’t recall how I did that but I think search and replace is helpful. Perhaps you need to use the SPLIT() formula multiple times. It’s a bit tricky but is done in a few minutes (if my explanation makes any sense to you). Now you have the bare audio id. Use the split function again on your Latin columns. Cut off everything that comes after the first space. Use search and replace to get red of all macrons. Search for “ā” and replace with a regular “a” and so forth. Now you need the CONCATENATE formula. Alternatively, you can use =F5&""&"" operators. Your goal is to produce DOS commands (sorry Mac os users!). DOS - remember that? Produce something like =“rename”&F1 or whatever your Audio ID cell is&".mp3 “&A1 or whatever your entry number cell is&”_"&A2 or whatever your cutt off Latin entry cell is&".mp3". Auto-fill produces 5000 similar commands. (And many more if count entries with more than one audio file). Now you open a Windows command line window. CD into the Anki folder. Copy the column you created and paste into command line. Now Windows batch renames all files. The once cryptic filenames become human readable and are sorted in the right order. Ta-da. It’s fun and very satisfying to see Windows do that batch processing thing. Since many entries have multiple audio files (whose ID you’ve separated earlier), you need to repeat that step after having removed the first successfully renamed batch from that folder so that you don’t overwrite files (which have the same index number and name). Does that make any sense to you? If not, give me a couple of days. I could do that for you. Just let me know.
Explained that here too: Copy courses? - #9 by Robert-Alexander
Not sure if that’s a better explanation though (Hebrew script transformation is the equivalent to macrons on Latin - DOS won’t accept such exotic scripts and letters).
That all makes perfect sense to me! Thanks for providing such detailed instructions and being generous with your time - really appreciated!
Thank you! 