I would be interested. I am signing up for an account there even as I type. I most definitely tend to prefer actual things to virtual simulations, and I am putting a lot of work into creating cards to use with White. But you make a good case.
@jamesbath: I don’t have any problems with their ads. They give you the option of hiding the annoying ad that is on the actual flash card page. That one I agree has to go, but they give you the option to block it. On their home page they have one side ad that is fairly unobtrusive and and I don’t pay it much attention. I use the Opera browser most of the time and it lets you block content with about four clicks, so if something is really bothering me, I can zap it. I’m hoping pretty soon browsers will be smart enough to let you zap some ad location on a oft used page and make the location itself blocked rather than just a specific ad. Maybe it is already possible?? Truth be told, I actually feel I need to use four different browsers for different kinds of features so I should maybe know the answer. Anyway, flashcardmachine is totally free and pretty damned good, so I don’t begrudge them one ad to try and make some money for their trouble. In just two weeks I’ve created about 400 fairly detailed flashcards and pilfered another 2000 from the public db. My only complaint about the site–and it is a small one–is that you can’t mark up cards that somebody else has created.
I just saw that you are interested in some cards. I got all 200+ Mastronarde verbs. I got 50 correlatives. I got 100 Plato cards for the Apology. I got 300 French verbs. Note that you can do HTML cards, so if you cut and paste from Perseus/LSJ you will have live links that you can click on to open up Demosthenes! No physical flashcard can rival that! And note the import features. If you have a two column tab separated list, you can import it and voila you instantly have flashcards. Tres cool. That’s how I did my French verbs.
Anyway, I’m done shilling for flashcardmachine.
There is a discussion of Heinrich Schliemann’s method at:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=943&PN=2
Here are the key excerpts:
From his autobiography:
"I applied myself with extraordinary diligence to the study of English. Necessity taught me a method which greatly facilitates the study of the language. This method consists in reading a great deal aloud, without making a translation, taking a lesson every day, constantly writing essays upon subjects of interest, correcting these under the supervision of a teacher, learning them by heart, and repeating in the next lesson what was corrected on the previous day. My memory was bad, since from my childhood it had not been exercised upon any object; but I made use of every moment, and even stole time for study. In order to acquire a good pronounciation quickly, I went twice every Sunday to the English church, and repeated to myself in a low voice every word of the clergyman’s sermon. I never went on my errands, even in the rain, without having my book in my hand and learning something by heart; and I never waited at the post-office without reading. By such methods I gradually strengthened my memory, and in three month’s time found no difficulty in reciting from memory to my teacher, Mr. Taylor, in each day’s lesson, word by word, twenty printed pages, after having read them over three times attentively. In this way \ I committed to memory the whole of Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield and Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. From over-excitement I slept but little, and employed my sleepless hours at night in going over in my mind what I had read on the preceding evening. The memory being always much more concentrated at night than in the day-time, I found these repetitions at night of paramount use. Thus I succeeded in acquiring a thorough knowledge of the English language.
"I then applied the same method to the study of French, the difficulties of which I overcame likewise in another six months. Of French authors I learned by heart the whole of Fenelon’s Aventures de Telemaque and Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Paul et Virginie. This unremitting study had in the course of a single year strengthened my memeory to such a degree, that the study of Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese appeared very easy, and did not take me more than six weeks to write and speak each of these languages fluently…
“My wish to learn Greek had always been great, but before the Crimean war I did not venture upon its study, for I was afraid that this language would exercise too great a fascination over me and estrange me from my commercial business; and during the war I was so overwhelmed with work, that I could not even read the newspapers, far less a book. When, however, in January 1856, the first tidings of peace reached St. Petersburg, I was no longer able to restrain my desire to learn Greek, and at once set vigorously to work, taking first as my teacher Mr. Nicolaos Pappadakes and then Mr. Theokletos Vimpos, both from Athens, where the latter is now archbishop. I again faithfully followed my old method; but in order to acquire quickly the Greek vocabulary, which seemed to me far more difficult even than the Russian, I procured a modern Greek translation of Paul et Virginie, and read it through, comparing every word with its equivalent in the French original. When I had finished this task, I knew at least one-half the Greek words the book contained, and after repeating the operation I knew them all, or nearly so, without having lost a single minute by being obliged to use a dictionary. In this manner it did not take me more than six weeks to master the difficulties of modern Greek, and I next applied myself to the ancient language, of which in three months I learned sufficient to understand some of the ancient authors, and especially Homer, whom I read and re-read with the most lively enthusiasm.
I then occupied myself for two years exclusively with the literature of ancient Greece; and during this time I read almost all the classical authors cursorily, and the Iliad and Odyssey several times. Of the Greek grammar, I learned only the declensions and the verbs, and never lost my precious time in studying its rules; for as I saw that boys, after being troubled and tormented for eight years and more in schools with the tedious rules of grammar, can nevertheless none of them write a letter in ancient Greek without making hundreds of atrocious blunders, I thought the method pursued by the schoolmasters must be altogether wrong, and that a thorough knowledge of the Greek grammar could only be obtained by practice,–that is to say, by the attentive reading of the prose classics, and by committing choice pieces of them to memory. Following this very simple method, I learnt ancient Greek as I would have learnt a living language. I can write in it with the greatest fluency on any subject I am acquainted with, and can never forget it. I am perfectly acquainted with all the grammatical rules without even knowing whether or not they are contained in the grammars; and whenever a man finds errors in my Greek, I can immediately prove that I am right, by merely reciting passages from the classics where the sentences employed by me occur.”
Now the kicker from one of the comments:
“A recent biography questioning his honesty about his archaeological finds does not question his language ability. His letters and diary entries prove his fluency in many languages.”
Well you shilled successfully. You sold me on flashcardmachine.com. If the offer still stands, I would like to see your flashcards. Thanks.
Thanks for the url. I’m preparing to download and check it out now.
(By the way, for whatever few minutes I can rob out of each day for language studies, I am enjoying “The Basics of New Testament Syntax” very much and looking forward to applying much of it to a flashcard database).
I think that’s a great idea! The way the text is organized lends itself to flashcards very easily. I like how Wallace breaks everything into categories.
Irene, thank you for taking the time to agree to my request.
Luckily I have a strong interest and university degree in my own language. I have always been fascinated by the structure of language, so I’m ok here.
Got it.
I am interested in a lot of ancient Greek, but the dramas tower over everything else for me. Good to know I have my goals set before I get deep into my studies.
I’ve done this in French and it has catapulted me to the top of my French class in reading skills (even if others can speak it better and understand what they are hearing better.)
Great advice.
Excellent point.
Thanks again, Irene.
Thanks, pster…that is great reading.
Has anyone tried the method of “memorizing large chunks of text” in the target language? I’m tempted to try the method myself for Chinese which I’ve started just a couple months ago. It seems that it could be very effective, as you would be virtually stamping the basic morphology/syntax/vocabulary of the language firmly onto your mind, and all of this within a real context.
By all means let us know how that turns out. In the meanwhile, since you mentioned Chinese, please tell me where, in the history of that language, you are beginning your studies. What form have you chosen? The reason I ask is that I have been wanting to begin studying some form of Chinese. I am very interested in learning how it compares with Greek and Latin, grammatically and otherwise.
I suppose the Mandarin dialect would be the way to go, since it is the most used of the Chinese dialects.
Thanks.
I am going to memorize Demosthenes’s Third Philippic starting March 1st. It is 10 dense pages, about 75 relatively long sentences. I think I am going to memorize it first without looking up words I don’t know. Then I will look up whatever words I haven’t been able to figure out. I’m hoping that I won’t want to look up any grammar when I’m done with those first two steps. Schliemann seemed to vary his approach over the years and not sure what he would say his polished method was. Anyway, I think it is going to rock!
james, I made some cards available with the title “Plato’s Apology” and the description “Vocabulary from 31-33”, but they are not appearing. Perhaps it takes a bit of time? These are the the first cards I made and so they rather inconsistent in format which I think is probably a good thing as it will allow you to see a range of possibilities. Make sure to try and click on the blue HTML words and see how you get sent to Perseus LSJ.
pster, thank you very much. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble for you. I will look for them.
Whew! Good luck. I’d be very interested to see how you do with this.
Mandarin. My goal is verbal fluency and Mandarin is the ‘standard’ form of the spoken language, so that’s where I’m focusing my efforts. I’m not really interested in reading ancient Chinese texts, although that may change over time.
Quite different. Chinese is a very analytic language, whereas Latin and Greek are very synthetic. This means that whereas Latin and Greek encode a lot of information into verbs, nouns, etc., Chinese uses particles and other things to mark ideas like tense, aspect, mood, number. Chinese essentially has no morphology. Nouns don’t even change form to mark plurality (there are a couple exceptions to this), this is marked by context or words like “many/few”. The nice thing about this is that once you learn a word (noun, verb, adjective)… you know it. The word will always appear the same way. None of the difficulties of someone learning English and seeing “went” and thinking, “Oh yeah, this is from the verb ‘go’, right?” 
Fascinating. So, what with English’s considerable dependency on word order and minimal dependency on synthetics, as compared to Latin and Greek, one might say that the grammar mechanics (if you will) of English is halfway between the extremes of Greek/Latin and Chinese…?
Anyway, I’m looking forward to it. And if you have any other bright ideas about books on this subject too, similar to Daniel B. Wallace’s Greek Grammar, please don’t hesitate to mention them.
pster,
I found them. The links to Perseus LSJ are quite helpful – more so than I had anticipated. Thanks. If you make more cards and don’t mind making them public, please let me know. I’d love to see them.
James
If we think of a synthetic/analytic spectrum:
( pure synthetic---------------------------------------pure analytic )
English would be closer to the analytic side, as you observed the dependency on word order, etc. However, English carries some remains of synthesis in forming plurals, genitives, and the past-tense. This is because English is descended from the same Indo-European language which Latin/Greek are descended from, and although it has become increasingly analytic, it has hints of its origins. Indo-European was even more synthetic than Latin/Greek, having a form for dual number (pairs), more moods for verbs, and more cases for nouns.
We see that Latin became increasingly analytic as it evolved into the modern Romance languages, which have almost entirely dropped the case system and rely more on word order to convey the grammatical functions of nominals. The Romance languages still have synthetic verbs though.
English is interesting because we have mostly analytic verb forms: infinitive–> ‘to walk’, future–> ‘I will walk’; but we also have synthesis present in some verb forms: third-person-singular marker–> ‘I walk’ ‘he walk-s’ (only in present tense) past tense–> ‘I walk-ed’. We also have forms that are partially analytic and partially synthetic: present progressive–> ‘I am walk-ing’ (helping verb ‘am’ is analytic feature, -ing morpheme on verb is synthetic feature).
There are no purely analytic or synthetic languages. As I said, it’s a spectrum, but it’s a very helpful categorization of how languages structure information. Latin/Greek are on the far end of synthetic languages, and Chinese is on the far end of analytic languages; so in that respect they are almost polar opposites.
Here’s a quick example so you can visualize it more:
“The-kids will-go to-the-store.”
This is fairly analytic, with the future tense formed by a helping verb, and the idea of motion toward
formed by a prepositional phrase. The word “kids”, however, is a synthesis of the root *kid plus the
plural morpheme -s which combines with the root to create the idea of plurality.
Latin would use only three words to express this exact same idea, with the extra information being encoded into morphemes bound to the main words: “kid” “go” “store”
Chinese would be even more analytic than English because there isn’t a plural morpheme in Chinese, so the idea would need to be expressed by a plurality word or if it’s understood by the context it need not be expressed. The Chinese word “kid” could be sufficient by itself with plurality understood.
calvinist, are you using “analytic” and “synthetic” in the Kantian sense? Or is it a technical linguistic sense?
james, i’ll make all my Greek cards available. Search for author “fster”. You should be able to find them in the next day or so.
It’s a linguistic sense - remember, the Greek roots of analytic and synthetic mean “breaking up” and “grouping together” respectively, so an analytic language usually breaks up meaning into separate words, whereas a synthetic language usually groups them into one word through morphology (e.g. analytic English ‘I have loved’ vs. synthetic Latin ‘amavi’, where English uses separate words to express the meanings “first person singular” and “perfect tense”).