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Selecting Declensions

The Selecting Declensions screen is the word-pool picker for the Latin noun drills. Whatever you select here defines the eligible pool of nouns that can appear in the Decline the Noun and Recognise the Form tests, and also defines which nouns appear in the Declension Paradigms study screen.

How the picker is organised

The picker is grouped by declension — first, second, third, fourth, fifth — and inside each declension by gender (masculine, feminine, neuter). Each row shows a count: e.g. "First declension · feminine · 96 nouns". Tap the row to scope your drill pool to that group; tap again to remove it.

You can also filter by:

  • CEFR / textbook chapter — Wheelock ch. 1–10, LLPSI cap. I–VII, and similar tags scope the pool to the vocabulary your textbook introduces in that range.
  • Topic — bundled topics (family, war, religion, body, food) and any personal topics you've added.
  • Frequency — high / medium / low, based on a corpus of Caesar, Cicero, and Vergil.

These filters intersect — if you pick "Second declension masculine" + "Wheelock ch. 1–10", you get the second-declension masculines that appear in those chapters and nothing else.

The footnote about irregular nouns

If you select All nouns, the count at the top reads something like "Selected: 272 of 274 nouns". The two nouns the picker silently excludes are vīs (force, strength) and Iuppiter (Jupiter) — both have paradigms that don't fit the regular declension engine and can't be auto-generated.

A footnote on the picker spells this out explicitly so you can see what's excluded. Both nouns are documented in the catalogue and surface in the Sentence Parser; they just don't appear in the production / recognition drills. This is tracked in the project backlog and will be fixed in a follow-up release when the engine handles per-noun custom paradigms.

Saving your selection

Your selection persists across sessions — close the app, come back next week, your pool is the same. To reset the picker to a default (typically all nouns of first and second declension), use the Reset button at the bottom of the screen.

If you want to clear the picker and start a fresh selection, tap Clear all at the top. The drill screens will refuse to start with an empty pool and prompt you back to this screen.

For learners new to Latin:

  • First and second declension only — covers ~150 nouns, including most of the high-frequency vocabulary. This is what Wheelock chapters 1–4 and LLPSI cap. I–III use.
  • Add third declension once you can produce first- and second-declension forms reliably. Third declension is the largest and most diverse group.
  • Add i-stem 3rd-declension as its own focused drill once the regular 3rd is automatic. The i-stem pattern (urbs, cīvis, mare) deserves its own session because the genitive plural in -ium and the neuter ablative in -ī are the most-forgotten forms.
  • Fourth and fifth declension last — they're the smallest groups and follow the textbook order.

For classics students reviewing a specific chapter, use the textbook-chapter filter and ignore declension grouping entirely.