Memorizing Greek words

Greek Learning Greek
1

As part of my desire to learn Ancient Greek from the bottom of my soul, I know I need to be reinforcing the language in myself, through quizzes, drills and the like. The trouble is, I’m a rebellious child and I chafe at such things, but I know it’s necessary nonetheless. The difficulty with most “flash card” programs I’ve seen, though, is that they take the flash-card metaphor to its extreme, never prying from the idea that one word corresponds to one definition. To me, any Greek word is going to vary in dialect, case, voice, number, gender, tense, and definition, some of which will be regular and some won’t, and sometimes the accents will change from form to form and sometimes they won’t! It’s clear to me that I need to be able to understand the Greek word as a many-splendored thing, and reinforce those differences in myself until I understand these things on the level that I can understand “their,” “they’re,” and “there.”

Does anyone know any program capable of doing something like this? I’m always hoping against hope that someone out there has written something like this with Ancient Greek words pre-loaded, but I wouldn’t mind having to specify the words and attributes myself (so as long as there’s enough object-inheritance that I wouldn’t have to go around specifying regular variations, just irregular ones). I may be a lazy child at heart, but I do have passion and drive :slight_smile:

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I think you’re confusing models and goals. Especially in highly inflected languages such as Greek, you need to rethink your idea of ‘word’. Are

καλόν
καλῶν
καλά
καλέ
καλός
etc

different words which you have to memorize individually? Of course not. The same goes for variants in dialect, or verb forms, which if added would increase the number of words you would have to learn by the order of thousands if not of hundreds of thousands, and still get you no closer to your objective. And indeed, you would arguably be even farther from where you want to be, since you would have theoretically (I say theoretically because no one would ever be even close to doing this) memorized them all individually, but would still have no system in which to integrate them and understand them in context.

So what you need is to learn the Grammar that will allow you to understand how the rules for word change work, and then use flash cards to memorize the vocabulary, nouns and verbs etc, or their irregular forms, and then combine the knowledge acquired in both into a functional learning of the language.

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A good example to show you how silly what you are proposing sounds would be to ask you if you would ever think that learning “Cup” differently from “Cups” is a good idea. Of course it’s not. Maybe you would want to learn that “Mouse” has “Mice” as a plural, but those examples are, precisely, irregular and rare.

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ἀπόλλυται

4

aphph: I don’t think you understood what I wrote; what I want is to learn variants as being part of a word, and the problem with most memorization programs is that they would force me to learn them separately. In any case, please don’t speak to me in such a condescending tone. I’m here to learn, not to one-up.

MarkAntony: Thanks! I’ll have a look!

5

You saw condescension where there was only a desire to help. But good luck with your studies anyway.

6

try visual education association’s box of 1,000 ag flash cards. an excellent set with a nice font. many cards come with up to six “related” words on the same card. they’re good for starting to get a grip on things like compound verbs, too. the 1,000 cards will altogether give one something like a 2,500 - 3,000 word vocabulary, a very solid foundation for attic prose. one can write references to any other word on them (i’m pretty analog when it comes to flash cards). it’s a good way to think about whether words really are synonyms, for one example, or if there was a reason one was used over the other, depending on circumstances, and what were those circumstances? the cards won’t give you that info directly, but they have caused me, for one pitiful example, to go searching on my own for those answers (rewarding unto itself). they also give all principal parts (when they don’t, it’s usually because the verb is regular with the remaining principal parts easily inferable from the the λύω/παύω paradigm). memorizing principal parts to the best of one’s abilities is crucial.

with respect to the english definitions, they range from matching liddell & scott (middle) pretty closely in beginning with a fundamental concept (e.g., φαίνω begins “to bring to light”), to not (i wish that σκήπτω began with something like “to stay or prop one thing against or upon another,” my own paraphrase of l&s, which i wrote on the card). but to be fair, the same card includes the meaning of the middle and the passive forms of σκήπτω, plus four related ag words and the english “sceptre,” and the creators are limited by available space (σκήπτω and its relatives are an interesting bunch. worth checking out.) λόγος has 13 definitions.

i make 100 card rubber-banded decks which i carry everywhere (hoody pockets!). currently i have 600 in rotation (i started in 2012-13?). a suggestion: make a pack of 100 (if you go this route) by using cards 1 - 10, 100 - 110, 200 - 210, etc. then make the next deck of 100 by using 11 - 20, 111 - 120, 211 - 220, etc. if one goes in strict numerical/alphabetical order one is going to be looking at a whole bunch of words that begin with alpha or epsilon, and that would get tiresome (to me).

there are flaws. some are easy to spot (“pass.” for “past”). some are not and are more serious. verbs beginning with “αι-” sometimes lack the iota subscript in past tense forms beginning “η.” however, sometimes the iota subscript is correctly left off, so, as always, check it against another source! also, watch out for abrupt changes in rough/smooth breathings in principal parts. sometimes the change is correct, sometimes it’s a typo.

hope this helpful to your studies and best wishes!

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aphph: Yeah, you’ve got a point. I can be kinda… defensive sometimes. (I’m working on it!)

ailuros: Thanks! Is this the one you’re talking about? http://www.amazon.com/dp/1556370083

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indeed!