Introduction
You are, of course, welcome to use these pages however you please, but this section was developed with a specific technique in mind, described below.
This technique may not work for all learning styles.
If there are particular changes that would make the extensive reading section more useful to you, feel free to get in touch with us. You'll find our contact information on the About page.
Recommended use
Start here before beginning lesson 11. The signs in lessons 1-10 account for 94% of the signs in the corpus, so it's not worth doing dozens more lessons to acquire the last 6%. The tablets are ordered so that the proportion of signs covered in lessons 1-10 is high at the beginning and gradually drops off.
Begin when you recognize about 90% of the signs on the first reading page of this section without looking them up. Slow recall is fine.
When working through the extensive reading practice pages, focus on reading as much cuneiform as you can, and skip what you need to. This approach is called extensive reading.
At this stage, don't write anything down or look anything up. You can set the answer for a sign to display on hover (see Advanced options below), but if you're recognizing most of the signs, you can always save the hover function until you've gotten substantial practice with the signs you already know.
Aim to recognize signs faster by building a mental image of an ideal sign. Once it's burned into your brain, a less precise rendition, such as a handwritten drawing or a photograph of a real tablet, is more likely to be recognizable as an approximation of the shape you learned.
Your ultimate goal should be to recognize whole sequences of signs as a unit. On real tablets, blurry, damaged, or ill-formed signs mean individual signs are not always discernible. You will need to rely on context, both from the surrounding signs and from the language.
Though learning the language is important, at the intermediate stage, read the cuneiform without worrying about what the Hittite says. Practice the language separately, in transliteration, using other resources.
You can also alternate this section with lessons 11 and up, to learn new signs while improving your speed at recognizing the most common ones.
About the text
- The lines come from the Hittite corpus on the Hethitologie-Portal Mainz.
- This section renders the original transliterated Hittite into the Ullikummi cuneiform font by automatically selecting a sign that matches the reading. When more than one sign matches, one is chosen at random, so the cuneiform may not reflect what is written on the original tablet.
- This means the website may not be used as a philological resource. It exists for reading practice only.
- Only undamaged lines are included. Damaged lines are silently omitted, meaning there is even less value in trying to translate the Hittite beyond any common words and phrases that you immediately recognize.
Advanced options
- The transliteration of the sign can be set to display on hover.
- You can set how many lines appear per page, and you can jump to any page. Use more lines per page for fewer interruptions, and fewer when you're short on time, struggling to get started, or bored and in need of more frequent stimulation.
- The signs can be blurred. You are recommended to wait until you can comfortably read the clear signs before using this setting.
Your progress
Your browser saves your progress for each lesson. The progress meter on the table of contents shows only your furthest page.