Daily Greek Vocabulary Challenge

Words in context. Vocabulary is one of the most challenging tasks you will face in studying ancient Greek. I believe that words are best learned in context, so I will be featuring 5 Greek vocabulary words each day, and each word will be illustrated by a proverb or saying.

Reading the proverbs. Each blog post will start with the 5 Greek vocabulary words, following by the 5 proverbs. Then, you will find the proverbs with an English translation and commentary at the bottom of the post. Here's a suggestion for how to use the material:

• read through the vocabulary items OUT LOUD, and if you are curious about a word, look it up in the Logeion dictionary using the link provided
• read through the 5 proverbs OUT LOUD to see what you can understand
• read through the English translation and notes, and if you are curious you can explore some of the links there too
• then read through the proverbs again OUT LOUD to make sure you understand each one

Reading out loud. The more you can read out loud, the better! You learn words with your ears, not your eyes. Language is all about listening and speaking. No, you are probably not going to speak ancient Greek. But if you really want to learn how to read the language, you need to listen, and listening to yourself read out loud is how you can do that. So you should always — always — read out loud.

Memorizing proverbs. Rather than just memorizing the vocabulary, see if you can also memorize the proverbs. If you are a beginning Greek student, memorizing 5 proverbs every day might be too much, so just pick the proverb or saying you like best to memorize! 

Slow and steady. If there are 5 words each day, 6 days per week (plus a review day), that's about 1500 words in one year. That's a pretty respectable reading vocabulary.

The words. To choose the vocabulary, I am limiting the selection to words ranked in the top 2000 based on the Logeion dictionary listing. 

The proverbs and sayings. Scholars were already collecting Greek proverbs and sayings in the ancient world, and modern scholars have continued that tradition, so there are literally tens of thousands (myriads!) of proverbs and sayings to choose from.

Verbs. For each verb, I will supply the present, future, and aorist forms, which are traditionally treated as the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd principal parts. That is plenty to memorize! Verb meanings often vary between the active and middle forms, so I would urge you to explore the dictionary entries for each verb to get a sense of its range of meaning.

Nouns. For each noun, I will supply the nominative and genitive singular forms, along with the gender. If you know those parts of a noun, you are good to go!

Adjectives. I like to treat the feminine, masculine, and neuter forms of adjectives as separate words. So, just like for nouns, I will supply the nominative and genitive singular forms of the adjective, along with the gender. If you study the adjectives separately, gender by gender, that makes it much easier to recognize all the forms.

Flashcards at Quia.com. At the end of each week, I will make a Quia flashcard deck that you can use to practice and review the words and proverbs for that week. I'll update this post with some notes about how to use Quia when the first card deck is ready.

Blog posts + email. I will be publishing the 5 words/proverbs each day at this blog, and you can also sign up for a daily email. You can subscribe (and unsubscribe) using this subscription form.