Knowing a word's vocabulary entry (nominative, genitive, gender) is important for translating it properly. The vocabulary entry tells you what the word's stem is (genitive - genitive case ending [ae, i or is]). It also tells you what declension the word is. This matters because certain endings (like -um) have different connotations based on what declension the word is.
amicum = friend, accusative singular (amicus, amici, m. is second declension)
corporum = bodies, genitive plural, therefore "of bodies" (corpus, corporis, n. is third declension)
Another important tip we discussed today is to leave out all genitives and prepositional phrases until the rest of the sentence has been translated. It is usually a lot easier to see how the genitives and prepositional phrases fit in once everything else is translated.
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