The Vis-ed company of Springfield, Ohio, used to produce boxes of 1000 flashcards as educational aids. These included several languages, such as Chinese and Russian. I recently acquired the Classical Greek series: I attach a link to these cards if anyone would like to find a way of using them on a laptop or mobile device. I think the company has long ceased to exist, more’s the pity. There are one or two small misprints here and there, and iota subscript is omitted altogether. However, what a fantastic resource! Here’s the link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Fqg8QQPT_mgDy2MRFssXOchV9ysXHYIH?usp=sharing
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Thanks for sharing. Will take a look. I used their set of German grammar cards while in college, and it helped quite a bit. Pity the company has gone away.
I came across this this morning. Any chance you could share the file so I may download it?
Thanks
Ernesto
I have put all the images from the above link into one zip file so you can download them all at once. Here is the (new) link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JgbOEtxSA1CretunVSga5W1Smq4u4ZsI/view?usp=sharing
I have replied to your query on Textkit with a new link to a zip folder containing all the images.
Best wishes,
Iolo.
Thank you very much.
Ernesto G.
This is excellent. Thanks for sharing!
Cheers,
—Mitch
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I have these and the Hebrew ones. They’re imperfect but great for some school exam of unseen texts.
I think they’re all still under copyright, so I’m not sure it’s legal to share like this, but you can still find them for a decent price.
I’m glad I had them, but for other languages, I found it better to make my own.
There’s an excellent spaced repetition based vocabulary tool called Anki (https://apps.ankiweb.net). There are several quite good decks for Ancient Greek and Latin, ranging from basic vocabulary to specialized lists (e.g. the 4000 item Odyssey deck).
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You shouldn’t use flashcards. You’ll find that even if you succeed in remembering the meaning, you will often fail to recognize that word in a sentence when you encounter it. You will also find that while you may be to successfully remember the word on the other side of the flash card, two months later, unless you have used the word and successfully incorporated it into your system, you will forget it. A much better exercise is to read a text, then match the new words to an English translation of the text. Then the next day look over the English text, then attempt to recall what the Greek word was that corresponded to that English word. That way you will both be remembering the context and the meaning of the word in that context. Another thing you can do is, once you have your list of, say, 10 - 15 words, make an anagram with the first letter of each word. You can certainly remember the anagram. Then throughout the day recall the anagram, then try to recall each of the words associated with the letters in the anagram. All that being said, I’m not even sure learning word’s meaning in isolation helps. I’m still on the fence on this issue, but one thing is for certain is that I stopped doing vocab exercises about 6 months ago and I did not notice any difference. I still want to give vocab exercises another try, however, so I’m not yet ready to write them off just yet.
I too have been coming to the conclusion that flashcards and similar vocab review tools are of limited value in learning ancient Greek. Instead one should simply read, read and (try to) read as many different kinds of texts as possible, interspersed with various kinds of notetaking activity and some digging into lexicons.
Re-reading a text several times can also be very helpful. The story and characters in the first few chapters of Anabasis only started to come alive for me on the third and fourth time I re-read them.
Discovering how many Greek nouns and adjectives evolved from verbs (and also the reverse) has also been helping me learn new vocabulary. For example, in Anabasis I came across the word ἄπορος which means impassible/impractical but can also mean poor (i.e. without means). Recognizing that the initial α was probably privative led me to look up πόρος which means passage, and looking into the lexicon I found the verb ἀπορέω which can mean be perplexed, be at a loss, or be in need. Learning a cluster of words like this that are etymologically connected can be easier than learning words that have no connection with one another.
Reading material you’re already familiar with in translation can be another way one can absorb new vocabulary. For example, I recently read through the Epistle to the Hebrews several times in the Greek, and being already familiar with the English translation I was able to guess at a lot of the unfamiliary vocabulary in the Greek original. Checking the lexicons later helped cement some of that vocab in my mind.
And I’m going to try and apply this approach to Anabasis where I got bogged down after grinding through only about one third of Book 1. My problem I think is that I was spending too much time researching unfamiliar words in lexicons and analyzing syntax. So what I’m doing now is reading through Book 1 in English translation in the Landmark book just to get the sense of what happens in Book 1, the key events and characters. Then I’ll read through each chapter in the Greek, and instead of stopping to look up unfamiliar words I’m going to guess their meaning from what I recall from reading the chapter in translation, and if I can’t guess their meaning I’ll just underline them and bleep over them. And once I’ve finished reading the chapter, then and only then will I look up the underlined words in lexicons (lexica?).
I guess what I’m trying to do is emulate how I learned vocabulary reading as a kid. When I was about eight year old, my dad bought me copies of Tom Swift novels (similar to Hardy Boys but with sci-fi) and I remember devouring them with eager enjoyment. But how much of what was in them did I actually understand back then? Curious, I recently found the novels online and tried reading them, and I realized I probably missed a lot of what was going on in the novels, especially characterization but also technical (and other) vocab. Yet when I read them as a kid, I never felt I was stumbling over unfamiliar words, I just kept reading and somehow absorbed a lot of meaning without actually thinking about what I was learning. I’m wondering if I can make better progress in Classical Greek if I try to follow this approach.
Thank you very much. Did you actually scan these in? I’m trying to imagine the person who made 1000 scans…. 
I vote in favor of flash cards. But when it comes to learning tools, one size definitely does not fit all. Some people like using flash cards, but many other people do not find them useful.
I suspect that most people find flash card study to be too grueling and too discouraging. But for those that like flash cards and use them, they are great.
Indeed, reading and re-reading (and, for me at least, necessarily aloud) has always been very helpful in the process of studying Greek. Not only in building vocabulary, but also getting words, forms, and structures imprinted in memory, even if not properly understood at the time of reading, which however, later, when analysed rigorously, would prove to be much easier to understand and memorize, and even readily reproduce when doing translations into Greek.
Re-reading is much more efficient if there is an audio support where I listen and repeat chunks of words, shorter at first, then longer. This also helps, in time, memorizing larger pieces of text. Here is a sample of the tool I am preparing in this respect: New Testament - Matthew. Of course, I do not expect that many would agree with the way I pronounce Greek, but I do believe that the method itself could be useful to others also.
I have to report a dissenting opinion. My Greek (and Latin) has been improving considerably since I started using flashcards. Not pre-made decks however, but rather 1) reading a few pages, 2) re-reading with a translation at hand, 3) skimming the text a third time looking for words I didn’t know before, looking them up in a dictionary and adding them manually to my Greek flashcard deck. The whole process forces me to interact with every word and I find that many of them stick with me right away. For the others, I get to review them periodically. The downside is that it takes time, sometimes almost indefensibly so. I tell myself it will become less cumbersome as my Greek gets better.
This was Gibbon’s method (sort of): to translate the text into English, then “throw it aside” for a few days, then attempt to translate the English back into Greek.
I use flashcards, but only ones that I’ve made myself. It can be a really tedious process going through looking up the word in a lexicon, figuring out which definitions fit the text I’m reading through, and then writing out a full Greek sentence including that word as the “hint” portion of the card, but that means by the time it goes into the flashcard deck I’ve spent at least ten to fifteen minutes with the word itself. Since I use Anki, I also have all my flashcards “reversed”, so I never know whether I’m going to get the Greek side or the English side of the card. Having to switch back and forth repeatedly during the study session really helps a lot.
I think the key similarity here with those who say they use flashcards is to “make them yourself” and to “put lots of effort” into learning Greek vocabulary. And with that I completely agree.