Anki and Acquiring Vocabulary (and other purposes)

Greek Learning Greek
1

Hello everyone,

I have been thinking about using Anki to familiarize myself with a large number of vocabulary.

I want to use Anki to familiarize myself with a huge vocabulary. I thought that I would get a list of words from the Greek Vocabulary Tool on Perseus, and create flashcards with the Middle Liddell definitions. Is this plausible? If yes, any ideas to increase efficiency of this process?

Additionally - I have read people using Anki to practice forms, what can I do with Anki that is beyond that? I have been experimenting with making clozes of sentences, making cards with Greek and English, and so on. How have you used Anki efficiently?

2

i have used it for a short time but did not find it useful.

3

This is certainly plausible (I do this myself), but keep in mind that the Perseus tool, despite being invaluable, is not perfect. Depending on the work or extract you’re preparing to read, the tool may generate many terms you don’t actually need to learn, since it can’t always disambiguate all forms (see http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/help/vocab#tfidf for more information). It takes time to weed out the vocabulary you don’t need, but IMO it’s well worth it.

You can speed up the process by using a tool like Diogenes (https://d.iogen.es/d/index.html) to carry out morphological searches for terms in a specific work, checking context to confirm whether a word in your Perseus list is actually a word you need to learn. Diogenes is also extremely fast and flexible.

I also assign fields in Anki to the frequency data generated for each term by Perseus. This way, I can quickly add definitions (I scrape mine from MidLid on Logeion) to all disambiguated terms first and start drilling these while working my way through the non-disambiguated terms, which is a more time-consuming process.

I used Anki when working my way through Mastronarde, and it was an immense help. I used it for everything – multiple Cloze deletion not just for morphology and principal parts, but also for whole chunks of explanatory text, and simple front–back/back–front cards for the vocabulary, exercises and readings. I also used the scratchpad to write out my answers in Greek for reinforcement. You might also want to use the audio feature in Anki, again for reinforcement. You can embed audio for both sides of a card, and you can record your voice when giving an answer to compare it to the actual answer once revealed.

4

I used to use Anki, but I’m older, 50 years old, and I don’t remember much of what I learned with Anki. That’s why I stopped using Anki. I try to learn words mainly with the help of reading, from the context of the text I am reading. I usually just read the words quickly, about 5 minutes, and then read the text with those words. And then I listen to it a few more times or at least read it.

Greek Vocabulary Tool on Perseus is bad. It has a lot of extra words that are not in the text. And it also has a lot of vocabulary that is very easy.

I’d recommend you learn the most common words first. For example:
500 most common words:
https://dcc.dickinson.edu/greek-core-list
1000 most common words:
https://camws.org/cpl/cplonline/files/Majorcplonline.pdf
Or the most frequent words from the NT, LXX or Homer, etc.
These words are already made for Anki, see link below.

I’m learning words, and actually not only words, but I’m learning the Greek language by reading a lot of easy texts - various Graded Readers, New Testament, LXX easy books and comics, etc. A lot of the books have vocabulary already done, even for Anki.

For example, there are glossaries for these books:
Italian Athenaze
For various textbooks and books:
https://bridge.haverford.edu/select/Greek/
Ready-made vocabularies for Anki!!!
https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/greek

Vocabulary books:
https://geoffreysteadman.com/
http://www.faenumpublishing.com/available-texts.html

etc. etc. etc. etc.
Lots of resources much better than the Greek Vocabulary Tool on Perseus.

5

How do you overcome the formatting of the definition? Whenever I try to copy and paste a definition (with or without formatting), it is merely readable.

6

I use a script to grab the definitions and strip the citations.

But you can accomplish much the same thing by pasting a full definition from the Middle Liddell in Word (paste formatted text). If properly formatted, the definitions will appear in bold, so you can search on non-bold text and replace with nothing.

I can PM you a Word macro I wrote which does essentially this, in addition to separating multiple definitions with semi-colons and replacing initial capitals with lower-case letters.

You then just select all in Word and copy. In Anki, place your cursor in the appropriate field and hit Cmd-Shift-X (if you’re on a Mac) to enter HTML edit mode, paste your result from Word and hit Cmd-Shift-X again to exit HTML edit mode. You don’t necessarily have to fiddle with edit mode in Anki, but if you don’t, you’ll paste formatted text from Word, which may not be the result you want.

It sounds like a long process, but it’s very fast once you get the hang of it.

Will PM you now.

7

Depending on your needs, not necessarily. If you’ve already internalised a large general vocabulary and want to read a particular work, focusing first on vocabulary specific to that work or that author, the Perseus vocabulary tool is hard to beat (I’ve heard good things about the Bridge, but have never been able to get it to work properly).

Removing common words and words you already know is simple and fast with lexical software or even just Excel.

8

Hi everyone,

After a couple hectic weeks, I can finally give an update to you.

I started out using Truks’ method (Thank you very much for sharing!). I would have a tab open with Perseus 4, parse the word, and receive a definition from Logeion. I would then paste it on MS Word, run Truks’ macro, and use that on Anki. This process was much faster than it takes me to talk about it.

I ran with this for several days, and had about a 1000 words. This practical method, for me, did not work for Attic Greek. Middle Liddell is much different than Homeric lexicons: the bolded sections, when isolated, are harder to read and recall. I tried to write another macro, but in the end, concluded that entering definitions myself was the effective way.

In my second trial run, I had only Safari and Anki on my screen. I condensed the Logeion definition and formatted it in a clear and concise manner. This, however, also became problematic for words that have diverse meanings.

Currently, I have two additional fields on Anki. The front has the word; the back has the definition; and I have added two fields for examples and audio. Why? If I add audio to the front, then I miss reduplications. The example, I find, increases recall greatly (I just copy and paste the phrase I have seen the word in, and its location). Likewise, hearing the word, I find, is extremely helpful for recollection.

The current method takes much more time than before, but for Attic, I found it to be the most efficient.

9

Is it possible to download the Dickinson College Core Vocabulary list? If so, how?

10

There is a CSV button in the top right corner (direct link). You can read this file with MS Excel or LibreOffice.

11

Thankyou. I couldn’t figure out how to download this file. But worked it out.