Motivation
After finishing my degree at Texas A&M, I decided to resume my Latin studies. One of the things I had trouble with was parsing, which is identifying the properties of a Latin word that tell the reader the word's role in a sentence. I searched for tools to help me with this problem, but found the available options not matching the vision I desired. Among the numerous problems were:
- Did not support multiple parts of speech
- Had a very limited internal dictionary, making the experience stale quickly
- Did not support macrons, which are vital for a student because they distinguish long and short vowels
- Lacked interactivity, behaving in a boring flashcard-like manner
- Had loud, unintuitive user interfaces that were trying to do way too many things at once
- Were stuck behind the confines of an app store, instead of being easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection
Once my developer skills began improving, I knew I could provide a solution for this problem. I sought to create a comprehensive, responsive, and robust web application to help Latin students improve their parsing ability.
Current Features
- Internal dictionary of over 1800 Latin verbs, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns
- Responsive design, featuring UIs for mobile, tablet, and desktop
- Dynamic custom-built word generation system, randomly drawing from the whole library or allowing users to narrow possibilities to a specific word type
- Answer checking system with multiple kinds of hints if users are stuck
- Feedback submission form for reporting issues or providing suggestions for new features
- Automatic generation of new words once the user inputs all answers to help improve engagement
- Full support for macrons
Future Plans
While I have released the first iteration of the product, I believe that there is still a lot of untapped potential. Some of these new features could be:
- Add a System for checking the English translation of the word, allowing users to test their vocabulary knowledge in addition to parsing
- Integrate vocabulary from existing Latin textbooks, and allow users to choose which textbook they would like their words to be taken from
- Implement a chapter selection field, restricting available word properties to only those that have been introduced at that point in the textbook
- Enable user accounts and provide relevant statistics to help identify strengths/weaknesses
Logo
I was fortunate enough to study abroad in Italy during college. While I was at Pompeii one of the most striking sites was the "CAVE CANEM" (beware of dog) mosaic, imbued in the floor of an aristocrat's entryway, which you can see here. While working on the project, this image resurfaced in my mind and I knew I wanted to make the logo conjure this style.
One afternoon I found a free-use picture of the profile of a wolf, traced it, and created a mosaic out of it using Adobe Illustrator.
