I noted that Latin has a few vocabulary tools. whether those that have and do use them benifit by them to me is unknown. Howeer, I would like to see a vocabulary tool for Homeric Greek.
the most I have been doing so far is writing the vacabularies out on index cards and flashing myself. I may get the stem but when I see the same word in a different Declension or a verb conjugated I get confused and back to open books study. am I the only one that has this problem about memorizing and what would it take to build such a tool?
Yes, I posted something about this a few weeks ago, the only digital tool seems to be a new and very expensive dictionary or the online dictionary through Perseus. I find the verbs rather confusing, but I guess as you keep learning they start to make more sense.
What kind of tool do you have in mind? I’ve made a bunch for latin, and they are easy to do. Greek got to be a little problematic because I didn’t know the best way to handle to breathing marks, accents, etc.
For simply learning vocabulary words (like flash cards) it’s very easy. Here’s what I started for Pharr: http://www.edonnelly.com/greek/ (click on one of the vocabulary tools). It’s great with firefox, because if you move the mouse over the black area the answer will appear. With internet explorer you have to click to highlight the answer.
What casued me to put this on hold was when it came to making declension/conjugation tools. You can see what I started with by clicking on the “First Declension” tool there. Here the idea is to type in the different forms, and the computer will tell you if you are correct or not. (I did a ton of these for latin, at http://www.edonnelly.com/latin/). It was easy for latin because I just ignored macrons, but I really don’t want to ignore all accents and breathing marks for Greek. For the computer to check, though, all of the “extra” marks in Spionic would have to be entered in the correct order (which can be a pain because the answer might look right, but be seen as the computer as “wrong” because the computer was looking for vowel + breathing + accent + iota subscript and you entered vowel + accent + breathing + iota subscript). Also, Spionic has multiple ways to represent most of the marks to make them look right over short or fat letters, and it just got to be too much of a pain to deal with. One option would be to make the program a little “smarter,” but it was just too much of a pain. I was also worried about it becoming obsolete as unicode gains in popularity. The answer might be to use unicode, but I don’t know as much about it, and I’m not sure if there is redundancy there, too.
As far as how useful they are, I don’t know. I can tell you one thing, though – you learn a lot by making the tools.
Now, my problem is that when I run index.hta, Norton Antivirus immediately claims:
Malicious script detected
(X) High Risk
Your computer is halted and needs to do something about this script
Object FileSystem Object
Activity GetFolder
File C:\Documents and Setti…\index.hta
Stop this script (recommended)
Before I authorize it to continue on, might you tell me why Norton might be complaining about AGTM?
