I am working on what might be described as an upgrade to my Ancient Greek Text Manager whose AGTM moniker now and then appeared on these boards many years ago.
I am perhaps 55-65% finished with the new version. Unfortunately, I can only work on it in fits and starts.
Based on a few instructive exchanges with Sean, I thought to ask you about features you’d like to see in this program and, with that in mind, examples of how you learn. The program is meant to be a translation aid. It presently supports:
capturing greek text
entering, annotating, and saving your translation
word lookup through multiple ‘resolvers’ (e.g., Perseus, ktl.)
exporting your work as a PDF
more to come
Some questions about how you work (thanks to Sean); do you:
write down Greek vocabulary you’ve had to look up in a dictionary?
write down your translations?
take notes on stuff you’ve found in commentaries, your own thoughts, etc.?
markup the text by highlighting, margin notes, etc.?
read without making any notes at all?
I would grateful for any and all responses to these question as well as any other thoughts you might have about how to make such a program useful for you.
Thanks very much.
Cordially,
Paul
PS: In theory the new version can support multiple languages. I am initially targeting Greek and German.
I put vocabulary from the lessons and words that I run into by chance into Anki. I’m also using Anki to make a set of quotations from Greek authors that I want to memorize.
I don’t write out translations into English. I know I have understood a sentence when it “clicks,” and my ultimate goal is to understand the Greek, not translate it.
I take notes on grammar points and make summary outlines. These are separate documents.
I don’t mark the texts I am reading, although this might be something I do later. One thing I will never do is write a translation above the Greek text. Once you have done that, you will never really look at the Greek again.
Yours is the first of what I hope are many replies. While the program’s functionality is still in solution, and nothing is yet crystallized, is the time to gather such responses.
I will try to identify some commonalities in the responses and use them to steer the program’s development.
Oh, a question I should have raised in the initial post: what computing platform, if any, do you use, e.g., Windows, iOS, Linux…?
Hi Paul
I use Windows. My approach to learning Greek is to select less complex texts - I am currently working my way through Lucian, either the hard copy printed work or the online version on the screen. I don’t make a written translation, as my goal is to read and understand the Greek not translate it. I make notes on vocabulary (but do not mark up the text), as well as grammar points that I need to look up. I do this in French, as my resources are mostly in that language.
Michael
Paul, thanks for this thread. I’m always interested in hearing perspectives on things like this because reading Greek is, to me, such a solitary experience. I’m always finding I adjust my practices as I go along. So, here are my responses to your questions:
1) write down Greek vocabulary you’ve had to look up in a dictionary?
I used to do this, but eventually found it to be time consuming and not that helpful, BUT it is very nice if you ever go back and re-read the text. For example, I did this for Medea when I read it the first time, and now I’m re-reading it and have the privilege of simply looking down at my notebook any time there’s a word I don’t recognize. That makes reading the Greek so much more pleasant. Perhaps it’s more useful for poetry than prose because poetry tends to have a more diverse vocabulary.
2) write down your translations?
I briefly did this recently with Thucydides but stopped. Like writing down every word I look up, it’s time consuming. I find I can easily understand many sentences as I read, without even truly “translating” them, so it makes no sense for me to fit it into clean English. I still do, however, write down what I think to be tough sections that aren’t explained in whatever commentary I’m using. This has happened a couple times with Thucydides so far, where Cameron’s commentary doesn’t explain something that I think is tough.
3) take notes on stuff you’ve found in commentaries, your own thoughts, etc.?
Not really. Perhaps I’m not inquisitive enough to know what’s interesting or not.
4) markup the text by highlighting, margin notes, etc.?
Never.
5) read without making any notes at all?
Yes, almost all the time. So far I’ve found this to be the most pleasurable way to read. If I was reading for a class or some kind of reading group, I would probably be taking notes a lot more.
@Paul, I’m not familiar with your ‘Ancient Greek Text Manager’, but following the mentioned features it will be something like LingQ or Foreign Language Text Reader (FLTR)? If so, I would like to share my ideas how to improve such applications.
will.dawe - thank you for the links to those two apps.
A cursory glance suggests that FLTR is the better analog to what I am working on. The main point of contact that I detect is the ability to look-up words against online dictionaries (I call them ‘resolvers’).
FLTR seems to require that one be online in order to use the online dictionaries. My program tries to diminish the need for that by allowing resolved words to be saved locally. The resulting local dictionary can then be used as a resolver.
In any event, I think it would be most helpful if you could share your ideas about how you would improve these apps; thanks again!
Learning with Texts (LWT) (and it’s commercial version LingQ) has overcomplicated architecture. It can be installed on the desktop computer but requires setting up web and database servers. LingQ is flooded with myriads of useless features (gamification), somewhat simple GUI would be preferred. Has internal flashcard system.
Foreign Language Text Reader (FLTR) is straightforward and compact. It does not require to be online and it saves user’s dictionary locally. It can be configured to lookup words in online dictionaries, but they are optional, so one can use their local dictionaries, such as GoldenDict. Can export flashcards to ANKI. It’s not easy to copy sentence or phrase I would like to save in my notebook, because this app selects only words.
What can be improved:
Lemmatizer. I tried reading a German text in FLTR and ended with the need to add every distinct form of a word into the local dictionary. As a result, such word-list is useless for ANKI.
HTML format of the texts. If you look at the texts on the LingQ website, you will see how terrible they are. I can download nicely formatted texts from the Gutenber library, even with images. Modern e-books, such as EPUB, can be easily transformed into HTML as well.
Dictionary look-up. (This is your idea with “resolvers”.) It would be very handy, if the application shows automatic translations of a selected word and provide corresponding dictionary articles.
How it could be implemented:
Lemmatizer. Adding full-size automatic lemmatizing is practically impossible—it’s heavy and I don’t know universal multi language library. But it can be “precalculated” for the text in advance, and then be distributed supplementarily to the text. However, such lemmatizer can be embedded into the app, if you develop a monolingual version.
HTML. If a user imports plaintext, then a simple HTML file can be generated with some general styles, but experienced users could use full advantages of the format. And I believe, that in the future such carefully prepared books (including lists of lemmas) would be distributed among language learners.
Dictionary look-up. I have written many “resolvers” of online dictionaries for GoldenDict and if you organize a share platform for them it would be very useful. At least, some interface to copy-past snippets of the code from internet forum to the application.
I have my own application (in Python) for reading, which I probably will never make publish because of lack of time and resources, but I can confirm that these features do improve reading experience.