Hi there, a question this time. In lesson 4 of food:
“Marcus fabas cum caepis et pipere coquit. = Marcus cooks beans with onions and pepper.”
Why is it “cum caepis” (“with onion”, gen sing) rather than “cum caepibus” (abl plural) given that “cum” normally takes an ablative?
Hi Jim,
‘caepis’ is the ablative plural form of ‘caepa’ (first declension feminine noun, the genitive singular would be ‘caepae’).
Thanks for your last answer. Another question: in the sentence “Avus et avia tua in Hispaniā habitant” why is “tua” used? I thought Latin tended to use the masculine when persons of multiple genders were being addresssed, thus would more likely be “Avus et avia tuus in Hispaniā habitant” ?
I’m having trouble with “There is also a table in the kitchen.” This is translated as:
Est mensa et in culinā. But, this translation looks to me like “There is a table also in the kitchen” (meaning that there is one somewhere else, too.) Shouldn’t the translation be “Est et mensa in culinā.”?? Thanks.
Seeing that the example sentence just before this one was “Mensa est in triclinio.” I’m pretty sure you’re right, this was meant as “also in the kitchen” (I’m not the original author of the course). I think it’s best if I add both phrases as accepted solutions. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Quick bit of general feedback. Although doing the course in this way is a lot slower than Duolingo, as you have to type out and get the patterns right, it is also a lot, lot better for learning. You do actually learn.
It’s also way better than most Memrise course, which concentrate on vocab acquisition but aren’t a lot of help for grammar.
Basically I think you’ve found a method that is vastly superior to the majority of online tools. And you should be telling people this, very loudly.
The one suggestion I would have is to extend the course with a follow up course sometime. I don’t think you cover all the tenses for instance, although I haven’t gone through the whole course yet. If there are things that are not covered, or could be done in a bit more detail, you might consider extending the course with a further steps course.
I’m glad you like the course, and I agree, it is a great way to effectively jump start someone’s Latin learning journey, and with these foundations it’s much easier to move on to more advanced materials and learning tools. Though the platform is not perfect, and sometimes outright frustrating, it’s still a nice tool for the committed ones who are looking for an engaging way to learn and a substitute until the official Duolingo Latin comes out.
I actually don’t think Duolingo would be as useful as the practice I am getting here. Duolingo is still quite terrible for grammar practice.
I am doing German as well, and find it reasonably easy to practice with Duolingo once I’ve covered the grammar in class, but very hard work when I haven’t. Similarly, with French, it’s great for revising what I already know, but I don’t feel I am learning as well when presented with new grammar patterns.
In contrast, with the lessons here, it is reasonably easy to understand what bit of grammar I am doing with Carpelanam’s notes or other course notes.
Then, writing the words blind is much less frequent on Duolingo, where here you are given as much practice as you need to memorise and therefore internalise the patterns. I’m quite convinced this is better, albeit it does have its oddities as you say.
Quick note that CarpeLanam added another lesson on Participles to her courses, which you may wish to add.
It will be interesting to compare what Duolingo produce, hopefully with CarpeLanam’s help!
Would it be possible to add alternative:
Gaius est amicus Marci?
Of course, I’ve added it!
But my advice is to try stick with the Subject-Object-Verb word order, because unless the original sentence was phrased that way, the alternative solutions where the verb is somewhere in the middle of the sentence are not added (I know it’s not optimal, but it would be just too much work for me to add every possible solution to the 2500+ examples)
Okay yep I get that. In the future, I’ll just flag sentences where I got caught out because the Subject-Object-Verb word order wasn’t accepted as an alternative. Thanks, appreciate the course v. much!
Memoria mea linguae latinae non est bona doesn‘t seem to accept SOV order…
Hmm, that’s strange, “Memoria mea linguae Latinae bona non est!” was added as alternative solution. Maybe the exclamation mark was the reason it wasn’t accepted? Memrise seems to be stricter with accents and punctuation in regards to the alternative answers. Now I added this solution without punctuation to be sure. Let me know if the problem persists or if you find other missing alternatives! And thanks for reporting 
Oh, it could be the punctuation. I do most of my studying on iPad at night in bed before lights out, so I confess I’m quite lazy about punctuation (and caps) in these exercises unless I have to be.
Thank you!
Oh, for anyone reading this about Memrise Latin on iPad, sometime around 21st January 2019 the Memrise monkeys introduced a display bug for iPad usage – the sentence display gets cut off rather than wrapping. The solution some are saying is to hold the iPad vertically rather than horizontally until they fix it (if they ever do.)
There’s a typo in the alternatives for “Sumus soror et frater; non sumus conjuges!”
“Soror et frates sumus, non sumus conjuges!” (frates » frater)
I’ve corrected it, thanks so much for reporting!
Pullus non in ovo est
Added, thank you!