To you accomplished Greek learners,
How did you memorize the principal parts of verbs? When I was studying German, I remember having a list of strong verbs that I would read out loud.
singen, sang, gesungen!
bleiben, blieb, geblieben!
That worked pretty well, but with the Greek verbs some principal parts are often missing,
Do you remember what your strategies were? Could you share your secrets?
My suggestion is to memorize all irregular principal parts as you encounter new verbs in your textbook, though prioritizing the first three as they are by far more common. When a principal part isn’t attested, that needs to be memorized too. E.g., for πάσχω, I have students memorize and say aloud πάσχω πείσομαι ἔπαθον πέπονθα — — [reading the last two as “blank” or οὐδέν]. I find it’s best to produce principal parts orally and in conjunction with verb synopses, which can also be done orally. Flashcards are always useful. You can make a game out of it to help practice. Since all the verbs in a textbook will be extremely common, you will eventually internalize the forms through repetition.
I had success with flashcards for purposes of taking quizzes in my Greek classes. It must have worked because now I pretty much always recognize the principal part when I’m reading a Greek text, even if I haven’t looked at any Greek in months. Although yesterday reading Thucydides I did forget the aorist passive of φέρω.
Thanks to you both for the suggestions. Phalakros for οὐδέν! and Manuel for the flashcards.
I use Anki. I can put each irregular part on a separate card, and the answer will be what part, of what verb, The Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek has a list of the “Top 101 irregular verbs” and then another “More principle parts.” Twenty-two pages, although there’s a good bit of οὐδέν.
For flashcards, I recommend putting a definition in English (or other modern language) on one side and all 6 principal parts on the other. When you practice, you should be able to go both ways (Greek to English and English to Greek). E.g., if one side has “I suffer”, you produce πάσχω, πείσομαι, … The 101 verbs in Morwood or any elementary textbook should be sufficient. And again, do prioritize the first three parts. Good luck! ὄναιο
Memrise course works awesome in order to do this. I know because first i learnt greek principal parts then two years latter i was looking for a memrise course which teach me the same way I learnt greek principal parts as I did.
Hi, here is how I initially memorised the principal parts, in case helpful—I first memorised the principal part patterns on pages 390–2 of Mastronarde 2nd edition, and then, when I went through Mastronarde, next to each list of principal parts scattered throughout the chapters, I made notes of any deviations against the patterns or selection of variants (usually only a few words needed for each verb), enough to be able to regenerate the principal parts from (1) the relevant pattern on pages 390–2 plus (2) my notes on deviations or selection of variants.
I mentioned this on an earlier thread: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/learning-principal-parts/17155/1 , e.g. you can generate yourself the principal parts of ἄγω using (1) the pattern for velar plosive verbs on page 391 (-ττω -γω -χω -κω, -ξω, -ξα, -χα or -γα, -γμαι, -χθην or -γην), plus (2) my notes scrawled next to the ἄγω principal parts on page 51 (“3 in 2nd aor. ἤγαγον, 4 and 6 asp. versions”), where the numbers refer to the principal parts. (You also need to know the rules for augment and reduplication, but that’s the easier part I think.)
I also made mnemonics (not “historical development” explanations in many cases, but pure mnemonics) for verbs that consistently deviate from the pattern, e.g. my notes for ἐθέλω on the same page (page 51) are “2–4 as if from *ἐθελέω, 5–6 lacking”, as a way of remembering the -η- in parts 2–4: even if this is not the “true” explanation for the -η- extension, it sticks in my mind as a mnemonic, and so it’s then easy to generate parts 2–4 from the pattern for -έω verbs on page 390 (-έω -ήσω -ησα -ηκα …). I have similar notes for many other verbs (e.g. for δοκέω on page 112, my notes scrawled in my copy of Mastronarde are “2–3 and 5–6 as if from *δόκω, 4 lacking, 6 asp. version”, which allows you to regenerate its principal parts using the pattern for velar plosive verbs noted in my previous paragraph above.
I won’t bore you with many examples because I hope the above gives the general drift, but I did find engaging with principal parts in this way actively (rather than just using memorisation techniques and tools) to be quite helpful for learning the parts of verbs with less “typical” patterns, e.g. my notes for καλέω on page 152 are “1–3 as if from vowel verb rather than in -έω (with intervoc. -σ- dropped in 2), 4–6 from zero-grade -κλ- with -έω pattern endings”.
To drill principal parts, I would then to regenerate all the principal parts using my memory of the patterns on pages 390–2 plus my notes for each verb.
Later on, when I stopped the “drilling” stage of learning and began just focusing on reading, I found it more helpful to focus on the “true” explanations for deviations from patterns rather than my mnemonics above (e.g. the “Historical developments” section of the Cambridge grammar, pages 16–34, as well as the explanations in Mastronarde on pages 386–9). Nevertheless, at the earlier stage of my learning, I found the exercise of noting deviations against the patterns helpful—far more so than simply using flashcards etc. for memorising the principal parts, which wouldn’t separate out verbs with a “typical pattern” from those with deviations from the “typical pattern”.
Cheers, Chad
I second Chad: noting deviations from regular principal parts is important even in the early stages. A decent textbook, like Russell & Keller or Mastronarde, should give some help with this. Many of the apparent irregularities in Greek morphology are actually regular once you learn some basic sound change patterns (as in my example above, πάσχω, πείσομαι, κτε). I didn’t really learn these until grad school. I wish they had been introduced in my undergraduate Gk classes—it would have demystified a lot. The introductory section of the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (CGCG) that Chad mentioned is an excellent starting point (and much less confusing than Smyth). Some students find such historical explanations clarifying and interesting; others find it to be too much, too soon. You just have to find what works for you. Either way, there is a lot of hard work and memorization involved.
I also benefitted from practicing principal parts with example sentences rather than just as isolated words. E.g., if you’re having trouble remembering πέπονθα: find a good example from your textbook or the LSJ and add it to your flashcard/notes/app.
I’m quite confused reading this thread - I have been studying Greek for nearly 3 years and never heard of memorizing principal parts! 
Now I see this would be an enormous help in language comprehension (especially reading) and the fact that none of my teachers never mentioned this is striking.
Therefore I have a few questions:
I don’t think I would agree that the aorist passive is rare. Perhaps the perfect middle, but that is usually easily identifiable anyway.
- Do you memorize this way only some list of irregular and most frequent verbs or all the verbs (like I do in Latin)? I have a list of 200 verbs with principal parts in my grammar - does it mean that I need to memorize only that list because other verbs just conjugate in regular way?
When I took Greek we memorized the principal parts of the most common verbs, like φέρω, βαίνω, βάλλω, the -μι verbs, and so on. I think this did me a lot of good. Occasionally I come across a weird verb form that I just have to sift through the LSJ to find.
- Where do you find principal parts for other verbs? LSJ often doesn’t give them at all or gives a lot more forms than that six. In Latin lexicons you have easy “(-are, -avi, -atum)”, but in Greek this is quite a mess.
Smyth has many of them in the Appendix: List of Verbs.
About frequency: In the indicative, the present stem (present + imperfect) and aorist account for about 90% of all verb forms. That’s principal parts 1, 3, and 6. Perfect stem and future are comparatively rare. You can find detailed analysis in Duhoux, Le verb grec ancien. There are also a few helpful Textkit posts about this by Helma Dik from a long time ago.
Bottom line: you should prioritize principal parts 1 + 3 or 1, 3, 6 (the future is usually easy, so 2 can also be included at an early stage). However, it is still best to learn all 6 for the most common irregular verbs. See the discussion above for more detail. Most elementary textbooks will get you started well enough. At the intermediate level, the 101 irregular verbs listed in Morwood’s Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek, the vocabulary in a book like North and Hillard’s Greek Prose Composition (available online), or Eleanor Dickey’s An Introduction to the Composition and Analysis of Greek Prose will help. Fuller reference lists can be found in Smyth and the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek. The LSJ has more detailed information, but you have to know a bit of Greek in order to sift through all the information.
Once you’ve memorized the principal parts of a few regular verbs, like λύω and παύω (typical paradigms verbs in beginning texts), you don’t have too much to worry about. But do thoroughly familiarize yourself with the “irregular” verbs (which to the beginning student appear to be legion). Verbs that have what appear to be radical stem changes like ἄγω, or verbs that borrow from different roots like φέρω are a must. I wouldn’t be too hard on your professors. The purpose for learning the principal parts is to recognize the disparate forms when you actually meet them in a Greek text. There’s more than one way to achieve that goal (but I still think memorizing principal parts is a good idea).
An organic approach that I’ve been trying, has been to restate sentences that I read, from memory, in the past/present/future without other changes to verb aspect or voice. So depending on the aspect, you’ll either get imperfect/present/future, or aorist/present/future, or pluperfect/perfect/periphrastic future perfect.
Having spent a lot of time correcting my daughter’s mistakes with English verbs lately, I think that there is some usefulness, during this exercise, to trying to form an unknown verb on your tongue regularly, and then going back and correcting yourself from a parts list if you missed the correct form.
You have to change internal sentence aspect relations if you try to do this with participles, and that leads to a bit too much nonsense Greek for my taste. Also it’s important to know how to transform indirect speech to the past.
Thank you all for the response. So I started learning verbs with all six parts with Anki. It’s difficult and time consuming but no so painfull as I supposed.
restate sentences that I read, from memory, in the past/present/future
I second this recommendation, though it doesn’t replace the need to memorize pparts. Basic transformations of sentences from your reading is a really useful exercise for students at every level, from the first year (e.g., changing verbs or nouns from singular to plural, changing tenses or voice) to the advanced level (e.g., changing between direct and indirect speech, including subordinate clauses in oratio obliqua; switching forms between dialects; restating things with synonyms or near synonyms or with syntactical variation, etc). It can all be done quickly and orally, as long as you can check your work or have a good teacher. I don’t see the need to specially memorize sentences for this type of exercise.
Lots of helpful suggestions in this thread.