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Recognise the Form

The Recognise-the-Form drill is the recognition half of the Latin noun coach. The app shows you an inflected form; your job is to identify what it is — which case, which number, and which gender.

This is the inverse of Decline the Noun. Production trains your output; recognition trains your input. The two muscles are distinct and most learners need both.

How a question looks

A typical question:

Form: puellārum

You answer by tapping the correct combination of case, number, and gender. The app uses three scroll wheels — case, number, gender — so you commit to all three axes at once before checking. (For nouns where gender is fixed by the lemma, the gender wheel is suppressed.)

The form on screen is real, generated by the declension engine for a real noun in your pool. Across a session, you'll see forms drawn from across the full case × number × gender space, weighted toward your weak spots once the adaptive engine has data on you.

Ambiguous forms

Latin forms are genuinely ambiguous — that's the language, not the app. Rōsae could be:

  • Genitive singular ("of the rose")
  • Dative singular ("to the rose")
  • Nominative plural ("the roses [as subject]")
  • Vocative plural ("roses!")

When the form on screen has multiple valid parses, all of them count as correct. Pick any one; the app accepts it. The feedback panel after you check shows the full set so you can see what you missed.

This is one of the places the Latin module diverges from the Spanish drills. Spanish forms are usually unambiguous (-amos is only first-person plural present); Latin forms routinely have three or four parses. The drill respects that.

i-stem and 4th-declension neuter

Two patterns the recognition drill makes you face explicitly:

  • i-stem 3rd-declension — genitive plural in -ium (urbium, cīvium, marium) is the most common discriminator. The drill includes these forms whenever an i-stem noun is in your pool.
  • 4th-declension neuter — genū, cornū — the long -ū in the singular looks like the genitive of 4th-decl masculines (fructūs) but is in fact nom/acc/abl singular. The drill includes these to force the distinction.

If you keep getting these wrong, the adaptive engine will surface them more often until the pattern clicks.

Plūrāle tantum and other edge cases

For plural-only nouns (moenia, castra, līberī), the drill only asks about plural forms. The number wheel still asks you to commit to "plural" — partly so the muscle of asking-the-question stays consistent, partly because students learning these nouns often default to producing a singular form and need to be reminded that the singular doesn't exist.

For the two irregular nouns (vīs, Iuppiter), the recognition drill skips them — same as production. The Sentence Parser handles them; the drill engine doesn't.

What's recorded

Same model as production:

  • Every answer (correct, incorrect, partial-credit) is recorded locally.
  • Partial credit applies when you got case + number right but missed gender, or any 2-of-3. Partial-credit answers count as half-right in the scoring and the wrong axis is highlighted explicitly in the feedback ("you missed the gender — puella is feminine, you picked masculine").
  • The adaptive engine surfaces weak forms first in subsequent sessions.

The same caveat applies as for production: Latin-side adaptive scheduling is partially wired in v1.0; the per-form weakness tracking is fully recorded, the adaptive re-ordering lands in a follow-up release.

  1. Pair this with Decline the Noun in alternating sessions. The standard pattern is one production session, one recognition session, then one of each per day during active study.
  2. Pay attention to which axis you keep missing. If you're getting case right but gender wrong, that's a vocabulary gap (you don't know the noun's gender) — go back to Selecting Declensions and reduce your pool to the nouns you actually know.
  3. Run the i-stem 3rd-declension as a focused pool for a session or two — those are the forms students most consistently miss.