Latin Key Words: The Basic 2, 000-word Vocabulary Arranged by Frequency in a Hundred Units, with Comprehensive Latin and English Indexes (Oleander Language & Literature)

A great concept - a book which covers the most common 2000 words which comprise a large percentage of Latin works. Not quite so good in its execution however.

Criticisms:

-The selection is not really based on the entire Latin corpus, but rather on a particular subset of classical era works which get studied at school level, and even more specifically is weighted towards pieces which are likely to appear in exams. This makes the book something of an exam crammer. (This would of course be a positive bonus for anyone trying to pass GCSE Latin, but more generally is likely to be a negative.)

-Nouns are given in nominative form only, rather than the usual nominative and genitive, so it's not helpful for the novice in trying to recognise certain inflected noun forms. Not necessarily a massive problem (this book really needs to be used in conjunction with a dictionary anyway) but it's just lazy to miss out the genitive and force the beginner to look it up elsewhere.

-Similar words are given separate entries. For example, laetus/laetitia (happy/happiness). It would have been little effort to group such similar words into single entries, and get more "concepts" learned together in one go, rather than just separate adjectival/noun/verbal forms of the same concept spread about all over the place. (In some cases one or more other words grouped in such a concept may be missing altogether from this book because they are not in the top 2000 like the others - this would just be a bit of a waste to miss them out on that basis.)

-Many of the words have blindingly obvious meanings because of being the same or very similar to English words with the same or very similar meaning. Annoyingly, Toner somewhat pedantically chooses very different English words as his translation for such cases, as though he's trying to deny the obvious equivalence or similarity, and he's somehow doing you a favour by giving an English translation. (Conversely, sometimes where there exists a not so obvious English equivalence which may not immediately spring to mind, Toner fails to give it. This would be a useful aide-memoire if given.) This in effect reduces the number of "key words" you are learning, as opposed to knowing already even though you might not have been aware of it, down somewhat from the 2000 given.

I think for this work to be a genuinely great learning aid it needs more and better arranged content. Based on my last two criticisms, 2000 words doesn't seem quite enough. That's not to say don't buy it. It will indeed be useful to the learner and I do recommend beginners to get it to assist in speeding progress by building a vocabulary of common words. But it's not as useful as it could have been with a little extra work on the part of the author.