Presenting "Latin Word Tools" software for Mac, Windows (and maybe
even Linux).DOWNLOAD INFO
I'm a bit of an efficiency freak. I don't want myself or my students
to spend too much energy / time reinventing wheels, or flipping
through dictionaries. I know some folks believe the best way to
learn a word is by meeting it in context. They're right. That's
the only way to really learn and understand a word. But it takes
quite a few meetings with words (8 or more!) before the word is
really learnt. Word cards are much more efficient ways of acquiring
vocabulary. Please note that cards are more efficient. Word lists are not so.
So I've made a little program so that you, the busy Latin teacher,
can easily make up word cards for the text you are using. Features
of the program are:
- Words can be arranged by frequency or occurrence (so you can study
the words you will meet in order of appearance in the text)
- Cards can be grouped. A number will be printed on the top-left
hand side. This helps organize study into manageable chunks.
- Student's names can be included on the cards.
The program will also tell you what percentage of the words you've
chosen make up the text. For example, there are 30 words which
occur 10 times or more in Augustus' Res Gestae. Those 30 words
make up 24% of the text!
You can also easily omit any word from the list, (et in ad non...),
words which are very common, but not difficult to learn.
This program gives you the actual form of the word as it appears
in the text, not the dictionary form. So students study the actual
word they will meet in the text.
So far, these texts have been formatted: (if your text is not
here, let me know)
| File title |
Contents |
| Augustus |
RES GESTAE DIVI AVGVSTI |
| Caesar |
DE BELLO GALLICO (books 1 to 4) |
| Catullus |
CARMINA |
| Cicero_Archia |
PRO A. LICINIO ARCHIA |
| Cicero_Cat |
IN L. CATILINAM (1 to 4) |
| Erasmus_select |
SCRIPTA ERASMI SELECTA |
| Genesis |
|
| Horace_Odes |
CARMINVM (books 1 to 4) |
| John |
|
| Livy |
AB VRBE CONDITA (books I & II ) |
| Luke |
|
| Mark |
|
| Mathew |
|
| Ovid_Art |
ARTIS AMATORIAE (books 1 to 3) |
| Ovid_Meta |
METAMORPHOSEN (books 1 to 4) |
| Plautus |
MERCATOR |
| Vergil |
AENEID (books 1 to 3) |
But wait! There's more!
All of these texts have been indexed and concordances have been
built. Clicking on a word in the 'Text' field will hilite it in
the 'Index' field where you can see where the word occurs. Clicking
on the index field will hilite the word in the 'Text & 'Concordance'
fields. A nice thing about the concordance is that you can easily
extract example sentences / usage from the text. Just copy and
paste into your word-processing program.
Just an idea of what you can do: find, select, copy and paste
10 usages of "in" from Caesar. Make a print. Ask students to underline
the noun that goes with "in" and note it's case and perhaps the
verb of its clause. Students should realize that "in" + the accusative
means motion and + the ablative means location. Total prep time:
10 minutes?
How much would you pay for all this? $50? $30? $19.99 plus shipping
& handling? Would you believe it's free? Well, almost. I've spent
20-30 hours working on it. The texts have been gotten from Project
Gutenberg and the Latin Library, so those folks deserve a lot
of credit, too. So I ask that you send some useful material to
me that we can share with everybody. In particular small books
that your student's have made (pdf, word, Appleworks, any format
is welcome). Please contact me before sending a large file.
Screen shots: here
How to Download:
- Get the proper engine for your platform Mac | Windows
- Get the Program file (Note Mac users: I've zipped this so our Windows friends can
unstuff it. The latest Stuffit program should take care of it)
- Unpack and put the engine into the "Latin_Text_Tool" folder
- More authors: Download, unpack and put these into the "Files"
folder of the "Latin_Text_Tool" folder.
Additional files 1 | Additional files 2 |