Latin is the language where generic flashcards fail fastest. A card that says magnus ("great") is not wrong, but it is incomplete. A Latin student expects magnus, -a, -um because those endings tell them how the adjective agrees with nouns.
That is the Latin rule: the flashcard should teach the citation form, not just the first word a dictionary happens to list.
Rule 1: Use Latin Citation Forms
Latin words are learned through patterns. For nouns, the useful form is often nominative, genitive, and gender: rēx, rēgis, m. ("king"). The genitive gives the stem. The gender tells the student how adjectives must agree.
For adjectives, the useful form is often the masculine word plus feminine and neuter endings: magnus, -a, -um ("great"). Writing only magnus hides two thirds of the pattern.
Latin adjective flashcard
Rule 2: Show Verb Principal Parts
Latin verbs are not learned from one form. A student needs the principal parts: amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum ("to love"). Those forms tell the learner how the verb behaves across tenses and stems.
Search can still be generous. If a student types an inflected form, the flashcard can resolve back to the dictionary verb. But the study card should teach the principal-parts citation, because that is the durable unit.
Latin verb flashcard
Rule 3: Do Not Treat Latin Like Spanish
Latin has gender, but it does not want modern Romance-language slash cards everywhere. A Spanish card like amigo / amiga ("friend") makes sense because those are the full learner forms. A Latin adjective like magnus, -a, -um follows a different convention.
The same is true for nouns. Puella, puellae, f. ("girl") is not just a prettier way to write puella. It teaches declension and gender. If a flashcard hides that, the learner has to reconstruct the pattern somewhere else.
Latin noun flashcard
How Ludus Applies These Rules
Ludus treats Latin as Latin. That means it prefers citation forms where the language expects citation forms. It can show adjective endings, principal parts, genitives, and gender without forcing those details into a generic "word plus definition" shape.
The goal is not to make the card look scholarly. The goal is to make the card useful. Latin asks students to memorize patterns, and a good Latin flashcard puts those patterns where the student will actually see them.