[Tutor] Storing dictionary value, indexed by key, into a variable

[John Aten]

Hey all,

I am writing a program to drill the user on Latin demonstrative pronouns and adjectives (DPA). It displays a description, and the user has to enter the DPA that corresponds to the description. DPA vary for gender, number and case, and there are 3 separate DPA. I have these stored in a bunch of dictionaries, with the DPA, gender and number in the dictionary name and the cases as keys. Of course, the values are the DPA themselves. Like so:
	
that_those_Masculine_Singular = {'nom': 'ille', 'gen': 'illīus', 'dat': 'illī', 'acc': 'illum', 'abl': 'illō'}

I have a function that randomly selects one of these dictionaries, and another that randomly selects strings corresponding to the keys ('nom', 'gen', etc.). The trouble begins somewhere along here:

D = chooseDict()
c = chooseCase()

print(D, c)

guess = ''
# code to get the guess
# then,
answer = D[c]

if guess == answer:
	# Do stuff, change score, continue, etc. 

This doesn't work, and I get this error:

TypeError: string indices must be integers

So my question is, why does Python think that D is a string? When I type the actual names (i.e., that_those_Masculine_Singular["nom"]) the answer is returned just fine. I have tried D['c'] and D["c"] also, and got the same error. I searched the web, and I can find no explanation on how to do what I am doing, and I can find nothing that indicates why this doesn't work. I'd really appreciate any help!

Thank you,

J