[B-Greek] Review of vocab

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Sep 30 07:02:50 EDT 2004


At 6:32 AM -0400 9/30/04, JMonte2000 at aol.com wrote:
>Hi all I have another question to help me out.
>I am up to chapter 22 of Mounce's book, sometime I feel like I am giving  you
>guys a play by play of my chapters. Anyhow, I try and do a full review of
>all my voc at least twice a week, I am a bit over 90% remembrance rate. I
>notice
> it takes me longer and longer to do that, about a 1/2 hour or more now. As
>you  guys amass so much vocab do you all still review on a reg. schedule or
>just  read? Or do both? If you don't at what point do you stop, after your
>through  with first year? By the way I am doing ok, but it always feels
>when I start
>a  chapter I cannot handle anymore. I remember I felt that way, way back on
>chapter  6 :)
>Grace and  Peace to You, Jimmy Montesano

Jimmy, many have found use of flash-cards as a very helpful way of
reviewing vocabulary; I thought that Mounce had a flash-card program
available at his Teknia web site but I haven't ever looked at it. When I
was teaching it I produced a flash-card program that permitted exclusion of
unstudied lessons from the vocabulary database; I don't know if Mounce's
works that way.

Two observations, both of which I've aired here previously:
(1) The most trouble I ever had with vocabulary was when plowing (almost
literally through 12 books each of Homeric Iliad and Odyssey in one month
while a grad student; my not-very-sophisticated-but-nonetheless-successful
method of getting over this hurdle was to keep a notebook listing every
unrecognized Greek word and meaning in context as I came to it--I found
that I had 10-15 pages of vocabulary notes on Iliad 1, about 10 on Iliad 2,
and that it got down to about 3 pages on Iliad 3 and successively fewer.
This leads to the other observation which I have reiterated shamelessly:
(2) The only sure-fire way to accumulate vocabulary meaningfully is to read
continuously long sequences of text in Greek, guessing at word-meanings as
far as possible from contextual clues but looking-up the words that you
don't recognize or that you think you recognize but aren't sure and that
are crucial to understanding the meaning of the text in question. This is
to say: the experience that consolidates vocabulary in memory is repeated
observation of words in similar or near-similar contexts that are just
different enough to suggest nuanced differences of sense in the slightly
different contexts. What a dictionary/lexicon (a good one that is not just
a glossary) presents is the analyzed fruit of such systematic observation
of words in varying contexts, and ultimately a good dictionary/lexicon is
essential to serious study, but the only way to acquire that intimate
familiarity with the multiple LOGOI that make up the LOGOS (using LOGOS in
the primary sense of the Greek word) is reading Greek texts--or, as Randall
Buth will jump in and insist, ongoing conversational interaction in Greek.
The likeness I've used often over the years is that idiomatic Greek is like
a terrain that one can only come to know by walking all over it repeatedly
at different times of day and different seasons. To some extent T.S.
Eliot's conclusion applies to learning Greek:

	"We shall not cease from exploration
	And the end of all our exploring
	Will be to arrive where we started
	And know the place for the first time."

Or, alternatively, accumulated experience with Greek texts, if properly
digested, makes every visit to a familiar text still more meaningful,
provided the text itself is meaningful at all.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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