Shakespeare’s plots, retold in the Latin of ancient Rome
Read from the first sentence without a translation. The course recasts Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies among Roman households, ports, streets and camps, while its vocabulary and grammar grow at the measured pace of a first-year natural-method reader. Tap any word when you want its form, meaning and full paradigm. The dictionary is Whitaker’s Words, all 39,339 entries of it, and it runs inside your browser: nothing you look up is sent anywhere, and once the page has loaded it works with the network off.
The course
LegendaOriginal Latin, not translated textbook prose: every word is one you have met or one the scene makes clear. The published opening moves from Illyria to Venice, Athens and Cyprus; the full course is planned as a thirty-five-chapter first-year reader.
11 of 35 chapters · 5,290 reading words · 464 lexemes
Dictionary
LexiconEvery reading a word has, with the entry behind each one: what case it is, what it comes from, how common the form is, and the full paradigm of the word it belongs to.
39,339 entries
The five declensions
DeclinationesThe ending tables, generated from real dictionary entries when you open the page rather than typed out. Where a cell has two endings, both are shown, because both are right.
Read off the dictionary
Declension quiz
QuaestionesPick the declensions and the cases you want to practise. The questions are built from the same paradigms the dictionary draws, so what you are asked is what the dictionary says.
5, 10 or 20 questions
What is different about it
- It runs on your machine. The analyser is a port of Whitaker’s Words that compiles to JavaScript, and it arrives with the dictionary as 1.2 MB of compressed data. There is no lookup API and no round trip: a word is parsed in a fraction of a millisecond, offline.
- The tables and drills come from the analyser. The story is written by hand; every paradigm, quiz question and chapter exercise is generated from the dictionary and checked against it.
- The reading stays in Latin. Headings, grammar tables and exercises included, in the traditional terms a Latin grammar uses about itself. The English is one tap away when you want it: meaning first arrives from context, not from a facing translation. 237 of the course’s words carry the vowel quantities a dictionary attests.
Salve! I could not find a concise, easy-to-use quiz for reinforcing declensions while studying Latin, so I ended up building my own, and it has since grown a dictionary and a course. It is still being worked on, so if you have feedback or suggestions, do reach out.
CrazyPickle · Discord @softspokenword
Dictionary data from mk270/whitakers-words at 9b11477e53f4, engine 0.1.0+395be8f75245.