I see that a lot of you are using Anki and I wanted to ask about making cards that work like this:
On the question side I see “ἄγω”
Click for the answer.side. There is the English gloss and “ἄγω” is repeated.
Click, now “ἄξω” appears.
Nothing disappears, the card continues to fill.
Click and “ἤγαγον”
Click and “-ἦχα”
Click and “ἦγμαι”
Click and “ἦχθην”
Click and NOW come the usual buttons right or wrong, how long until the next review.
The number of fields stays constant. If there are less than six principal parts I can fill in ∅.
I don’t want to type in the answers. I just want the principal parts to appear one by one so I can test myself and build a chain of associations.
I have used Anki up to now but I find the descriptions and instructions rather cryptic. I will try out the cloze deletion approach.
I am now using Mastronarde–for my second march through the grammar after White’s First Greek Book. The principal parts drills are just what I had in mind, except that they won’t let me prioritize the verbs I keep messing up and send the easy ones to the back of the queue. That’s where I hope Anki comes to the rescue.
As I was working through Mastronarde, I found what helped me solidify the principal parts in my memory was making one card with Cloze deletions for all the parts of one verb, as well as one separate non-Cloze ‘basic (and reversed)’ card for each separate part (i.e. without the others alongside it). Each time I would get the Cloze full set of parts, I would say them aloud and supply the missing one. The other basic/reversed cards would force me to recall the individual parts in isolation. For whatever reason, this two-pronged approach worked for me.
Just one more suggestion – you might also consider creating Cloze deletion cards for the regular patterns Mastronarde gives in section 3 of Appendix B (p. 390 in the second edition). These are a great help.
Truks, thanks for pointing out the classification of verbs in Mastronarde. I have done historical linguistics for other languages; for Greek, I can see it will be helpful as well as fascinating.
Now if only I could get my cloze deletion cards to behave like Will Dawe’s. I am wondering if my Anki is broken or something, but it’s probably me that needs to get sorted out.
