Welcome to Dowling’s Roulette

To learn Latin by the Dowling Method, or indeed by many other methods, you must memorize the endings for the various cases and declensions of nouns. To do this, Dowling recommends writing out the declension tables 100–200 times each. Jonathan Aquino’s “Dowling’s Wheel” will let you type out the tables instead.

I have written

Dowling’s roulette
as an alternative to Dowling’s Wheel.

Selected material is also provided in through the following link:

Reversed mode
This is for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in which one form of the word (such as rosae) has more than one possible meaning (in this case, genetive singular, dative singular, and nominative plural.)

These pages differ from “Dowling’s Wheel” in a number of ways.

First, we make it easier to use on a mobile device. This makes it easier to follow Dowling's suggestion of using “dead time” to work on memorization.

Second, we randomize the order of the cases. This avoids debate between Aelius Donatus’s traditional case ordering and the modern ordering used in Britain and British-influenced countries, encourages the student to remember that “-īs” or “-ibus” is the “ablative plural ending” and not just “the last case ending”, and (most importantly) prevents the student from typing without thinking.

Third, we have both more and fewer endings to type. Fewer, because I have tried to avoid repetition in an effort to keep things from growing too tedious (and to keep the verb paradigms from growing too long). More, because I have included some additional material such as adverbs, comparatives, superlatives, the infinitive and imperative moods of verbs, many irregular words, etc.

In the spirit of Lingua Latīna per se Illustrata, I have chosen to write the two linked pages entirely in Latin. Note that I wrote these pages to help myself learn Latin. In particular, these pages were written in Latin by someone who is a better programmer than a Latinist. If you see any errors, you can let me know at origamist@gmail.com.