Essential Latin Vocabulary/Mark A. E. Williams

Descriere

This book is designed to help beginning and intermediate students master the vocabulary necessary to read real Latin with fluency and comprehension. It also serves as a resource for instructors and tutors. The text presents 1, 425 words that allow a student to comprehend about 95 percent of all the vocabulary they will ever see in an actual Latin text. The terms found in the present book have been culled from statistical analyses of the works of more than two hundred authors in order to identify the core vocabulary. Were students to start out by learning the 25 most common words on this list, an astonishing 29 percent of all the vocabulary ever needed would be at their command. If a student masters the 300 most frequent words in this list, well over half of all the vocabulary necessary for fluent reading will be theirs. The goal of the book is to provide the student with the most efficient way to learn vocabulary. Chapters 1 and 2, in particular, are designed for drill, review, and study. The first chapter draws together all words that share the same grammatical classification. For example, all third declension neuter nouns are brought together in one place, with their definitions. By listing the vocabulary in grammatical groups, all the words that share a set of endings are assembled for the student: vocabulary and endings thus reinforce each other. Furthermore, each list of terms is broken down into groups of five words for ease in drawing up vocabulary lists to work with. Within the grammatical lists, each part of speech is preceded by an account of how the terms within are distributed. A student thus quickly learns that while there are 413 verbs that need to be mastered, well over one-third of these (157) are found in the third conjugation, while only about one per-cent (21) will be found in the fourth conjugation. With such information, independent students or instructors can prioritize their study and assignments more appropriately. In the second chapter, large