I’m an American, so broadly speaking monolingual; I have long relied for my casual language learning on things like Duolingo.
However, I converted to Christianity in my 30s and find myself wanting to be able to read Greek for both the obvious New Testament as well as for the patrologia graeca and medieval Greek texts. Latin I have only a secondary interest in, and Greek is already more than a handful!
If you’ve got any tips on how to use flash cards, I wanted to be able to supplement my reading grammar texts with recognizing vocab, but it feels like there’s so many different ideas about the “right” way to use flash cards for vocab and I want to do it “right”, whatever that means—so I’m open to tips on flash cards!
English to Greek gets you more miles than Greek to English.
Cloze deletion is great too, especially for verb or noun forms and prepositions.
Phrases are better than single words.
Rather than “learn all the words on my vocabulary list”, it can be more useful to learn all the words in a particular chunk of text, say Mark chapter 1. And then read to review.
I personally found that large amounts of effort invested in comprehensive decks were an ultimate waste of time. Quick decks used to review mostly new things once seemed to work better than the “put everything in Anki” approach. There’s a post online somewhere about how to fail medical school through Anki overuse.
When I was new, we used a book that had groups of words organized by most common to least common in the New Testament. When I get home today I’ll try to find the book title for you. I imagine lists like that could be found online as well. We started with learning the most common words, and then gradually worked our way to the less common words. It wasn’t long before we could read most things without hardship (well, the hardship is the verb forms, but that comes with time).
The nice thing about the NT is that the vocabulary is limited. It’s relatively easy to learn all of the vocabulary. It’s when you start expanding outside of the NT that you have to learn a lot more words.
In addition to frequency lists, it has lists of words grouped by their roots (for example, words with γεν at the root: γινομαι, παραγινομαι, γονευς, γενος, and so forth).
And toward the end it has lists of principal parts for common verbs. Very helpful little book, for the price.