AlxAlk wrote:I'm just a newbie in Latin too. Started last weeks.
I'm so confused with declinations, every phrase seems to be hard to set.
Oh, and I'm brazillian, Portuguese native.
If your native language is Portuguese, one thing that may help (especially with the more irregular declensions) is realising that, with few exceptions, inherited words are based on the
accusative form of nouns and adjectives, not the nominative forms used as dictionary entries.
So, for instance,
homem comes from
hominem, not directly from
homo. (You can see the different in French, where
hominem yields
homme "man", but
homo gives
on "one; we".)
Amigos is from
amicos (the accusative plural), not from
amici (the nominative plural).
Where there are irregularities, they're generally in the nominative. So, for instance, the word for "king" has a
g in all of its forms (genitive
rēgis, dative
rēgī, accusative
rēgem, ablative
rēge)
except the nominative (and vocative) singular
rēx. It may seem odd to treat the most exceptional form of the word as the most important form of it, but that's the tradition.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons