Hi There,
I’m trying to find a good way to build up my Greek vocabulary by harvesting words from Perseus.
Perseus has the ability to explort to vocab lists to XML, however, I don’t know how to use this. The function seems to produce code on the web browser, without any way to download it. Does anybody know how to use this data?
I also want to create my own flashcards in quizlet or Anki, but neither app seems to have the ability to write in Greek, yet clearly, people have created Greek flashcards. What am I missing?
The easiest way is just to select the list you’ve created in Perseus in your browser and paste it into another application. I generally use Excel. One tip: you might consider pasting the list without formatting because the lemmata will remain hyperlinked in your copied list, which can be annoying when you’re working with the data in other apps.
I don’t know about quizlet, but you can type in Greek in Anki by switching your operating system’s keyboard to Greek. If you’re a Mac user, you can set this up in System preferences → Keyboard → Input sources. Here you can add Greek – Polytonic as a new keyboard. Under the Shortcuts tab, you can define a shortcut to switch back and forth between keyboards. I use command-space, which works very well. The procedure for adding a keyboard in Windows is probably similar – maybe someone else here knows the exact procedure.
You might also consider GreekKeys (https://classicalstudies.org/publications-and-research/about-greekkeys-2015), which is a custom polytonic Greek keyboard for Mac and Windows written by Donald Mastronarde. There’s nothing wrong with the native Mac polytonic keyboard, but I find GreekKeys more intuitive and easier to use.
If you want Anki to use a particular font for Greek when you’re reviewing cards, see this page (specifically, the section entitled ‘Installing fonts’): https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/styling.html
When I tried to use Anki to make Greek flashcards, I saw inconsistent, buggy behavior when I tried to type accented characters on the keyboard while running the application. (Polytonic Greek keyboard input works fine on my system on every other application I use.) Anki allows importing data from a CSV file, so you could always just type up your cards in a CSV file and then import them.
I’ve had better luck with Mnemosyne: https://mnemosyne-proj.org/help/index.php . Physical flashacrds are also pretty nice, actually. Making them is just as much a learning experience as using them.
Will you say more about this, Ben? What makes you decide to make a set of cards? Do you make big stacks of them consistently according to a rule, or do you make up a small stacks ad hoc, for a particular problem, or something else? What kind of cards do you use? Handwritten, or typed?
I use writing-to-learn in this way. I write the sentence under study in a notebook, breaking the lines according to phrases. Then I write notes on each phrase, sometimes translationese, sometimes adding notes on a grammatical principle or an idiom. I rarely return to the notes; instead I hope that writing itself helps promote learning. Somehow this makes it easier to understand the sentence, and to identify issues I would not have noticed.
It does make me somewhat dependent on writing. For example, when baffled, my first thought is to write out the sentence again.
A couple of years ago was when I started in on ancient Greek, after not having touched any Greek at all for about 20 years. I decided that I needed to build up some sort of base vocabulary before it was even worth messing around with reading anything, so I just found some lists of the most common words in koine and Homer and made cards for them all. I put English on one side and Greek on the other, hand-written. On the Greek side, at the very bottom, I put notes about stuff like cognates that would help with learning it, the genitive of the noun if it wasn’t obvious, or usage notes. When I would draw a card, I would keep my thumb over that stuff and try to remember the meaning without peeking at it. I would randomly pull out small stacks of about 20 cards and work on them in multiple sessions, discarding ones that I was sure I knew.
I used the cards for about 6 months or a year, but since then I’ve been only really reviewing and learning vocabulary as it comes up in reading. I have electronic files that I maintain now. Example: https://github.com/bcrowell/ransom/blob/master/glosses/ιοχεαιρα
What I did with the electronic flashcards was actually a lot of exercises in parsing inflected forms, which I created using software. Those cards are on the Mnemosyne site, although in the wrong category because of a problem with their web interface: https://mnemosyne-proj.org/card-sets/business
I think I could probably benefit from going back to the flashcards now, because there are some words that are hard to remember, and they don’t come up often enough in reading, so every time I hit it, I’ve forgotten it. An example I can never remember is τέτμον. But I’m actually having a lot of fun reading now that I’m building up my skill, so it’s hard to motivate myself to go back to drill
Yeah, I sometimes do something similar. If there’s a complicated sentence that I’m having trouble with, I find that it helps me to focus on the details if I scribble a translation in the margin of the book. It helps me to discipline myself so that I’m not omitting any word, and carefully considering things like the case of the noun.
