Flashcards questions

[godingly]

Hey, I'm writing vocabulary flashcards, and I have several questions:
1) What cases / tenses should I write in order to be able to decline nouns / verbs?
is nom. gen. sg. and gender enough for nouns?
2) When must I note a macron? exempli gratia, the word χώρα . can I just assume the α is long because of the diacritic over ω? i.e. if α was short, it would be *χῶρᾰ ?
I much rather deduce the length of alpha than have to note it down every time.
3) I've read so many opposing views about vocabulary memorization. It currently takes up to 10-15% of my study time - do you think it has any value? I have never learned one vocabulary list in English (L2) - I've simply read a lot.

Edit: I'm learning Attic.

[swtwentyman]

I'm a beginner who has yet to crack the Anabasis (just finished reviewing the textbook and the next two days are set aside to watch the Twilight Zone marathon, so I'm planning to start next week) but for nouns I note the nominative and genitive singular with gender. The omega would be a circumflex with a short alpha on the ultima as an accent rule so the fact that it's acute does indicate that it's a long alpha. As for forms of verbs: you need six forms to fully conjugate a verb. Just memorize the forms that you've learned so far (in Mastronarde first the first principal part, then the first three, and finally the latter three).

For making flash cards (the reason I'm replying; I'm intermediate at Latin so I have some idea of what I'm talking about) I've just copied the vocabulary lists from the book. For what it's worth, when I was first reading the Bello Gallico I would make flash cards of all unfamiliar words and try to memorize them before reading the passages. This wasn't the most efficient method and actually got in the way and eventually I found myself reading with the dictionary open, seeing the words in context and working out the right meaning from that. Nevertheless the brute-force memorization helped build a greater vocabulary -- when I was flipping around the dictionary I would be (and am, as that's currently how I do it) a little slack on making vocabulary cards. My success rate at memorizing words would be something like 40-50%, reading new material every day. In working through Mastronarde's textbook that was more like 80%.

Long story short is that you don't have to memorize every last word in reading actual texts but I'd recommend reading with the dictionary/lexicon open and looking up unfamiliar words while noting those words (I use a notebook) and after figuring out the passage making flash cards and drilling them. A bit time-consuming but it would seem to be a good fusion of those two methods. As for the amount of time, I don't know. For Mastronarde I'd drill whenever I had the spare time -- just bring the cards wherever you go and you'll be surprised at how well you can do.

[Hylander]

For verbs, I would suggest the full set of principal parts only for irregular verbs. In most cases there's no need to learn principal parts separately for, e.g. contract verbs, verbs in -ευω, etc.