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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 parts
of the vocabulary, with their attendant definitions, are regrouped
by topics. A student who wishes, therefore, to focus on nature,
human emotions, or military issues, will find such vocabulary
conveniently grouped together. Chapter three lists the vocabulary
terms from the most frequently occurring words to the least
frequent. Students or instructors who wish to lean more heavily on
the most (or least ) frequently occurring terms within their drills
and studies can thus consult this frequency list. After the
frequency list, the fourth chapter presents an alphabetical index
of the terms. Two final chapters close the text. The first is a
list of endings and paradigms for nouns, adjectives and verbs.
Complete paradigms and endings are given for review. The final
chapter provides the student with an additional one hundred words
that are uniquely common in the Latin of the Middle Ages. These one
hundred words, if added to the mix, would give the student a
Mediaeval vocabulary that would match the efficiency of the
Classical vocabulary that is the main focus of the book. For the
effort of learning an additional one hundred words, another 1,000
years of Latin texts open up before the student. As a whole, then,
this book offers the vocabulary that forms the core of one thousand
seven hundred years of Latin literature. If the goal is to learn to
read Latin with joy and ease, then the vocabulary terms in this
book are one of the major keys to success. By learning these terms,
a student's vocabulary should be ready to tackle the Latin of any
era from the Classical period to the Renaissance.
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