I am hoping to create an interactive electronic flashcard set of the 2000 or so vocab words that account for 85% of classical authors’ word choices. I want it to require the user to see, hear, and type out Greek text. I’m imagining this as something of a “homemade Duolingo” for Attic Greek, as a tool to get up and running as quickly as possible to a vocabulary that allows the broad reading of texts.
The goal is to have a deck complete with all principle parts and genitive noun forms that plays audio of a vocab word in Greek or English and then requires the user to actually type out the Greek words. I’d like to go English → Greek and Greek → English. I find that I learn much more effectively with an active form of production like typing or writing out words, rather than passively viewing flashcards, especially given all the complexities of accent and breathing inherent in Greek. So I’m looking to create an interactive flashcard deck that requires me to produce the forms manually, checks them, and incorporates spaced repetition to optimize efficiency and learning rate. Endgame should be a resource that could be shared among Greek students as a tool for acquiring a core vocabulary for reading absolutely as quickly and painlessly as possible.
So the question is, how best to do this? My current thought is to create an Anki deck. Anki has a great spaced repetition system and allows for the use of audio recordings of the words, as well as manual typed entry of the answer and a comparison against the correct answer. The one difficulty I’m having is the manual typed entry of Greek text in the fill-in-the-blanks when reviewing cards. I have been using Tavulsoft Keyman on my computer to allow typing in Greek. I love being able to type letters and then adjust them for breathings and accents, and the layout of the keyboard is a very quick learn for an English user. The problem is, Anki seems to get a little glitchy when I use Keyman to type the Greek when I’m reviewing the cards and answering the questions. It will sometimes suddenly turn invisible or delete the whole word that I’m typing, and I have to go back and type it in again. This seems to happen primarily when adding accents to vowels. It works most of the time, and I could put up with it, but maybe 5% of the time it screws up and annoyingly forces me to re-type my answer. I could maybe deal with that, but it’s harder to imagine sharing a sort of “gimpy” resource like that with others. It’s a pity, because otherwise the whole setup is perfect. I’m reluctant to use the more official polytonic greek keyboard that can be accessed through Windows settings, because I find it difficult to learn and very cumbersome to produce the necessary accents on an English keyboard.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how to produce a fluid, spaced repetition vocabulary deck that would allow the easy typing and checking of polytonic Greek? Any ideas on how to get Anki to work right, or other potential programs or solutions to try? I think if I could get this right, it could be a big gift to the textkit community and all of us digital Attic neophytes.
Any thoughts, feedback, or revisions to my idea are most welcome.
p.s.
I’m also considering doing something very similar for the Greek Ollendorff, for the purpose of reinforcing grammar. It would be a way of working through the exercises systematically, hearing, seeing, and producing the Greek, and incorporating spaced repetition so that if you get something wrong, you return to it until it sinks in, and if you have things nailed down completely, you don’t keep reviewing them.