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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Posted: Thu Nov 02, 2017 6:08 pm
by Seneca
MorkTheFiddle wrote:
Cavesa wrote:(I had to gain a large vocabulary for C2 French and I would never have achieved that without extensive reading and listening).

I learned thousands of words of German and tens of thousands of words in French and Spanish using first LingQ and then LWT. With those apps it's a matter of looking up and recording a word. The next time you see the word, if you don't remember its meaning, you hover the mouse over the word and see the definition you recorded earlier. You can use SMS systems with either LingQ or LWT, but I very quickly stopped using them because they seemed nothing but a nuisance to me.
Extensive reading did not work for me with Latin because for me almost (I say, almost) all Latin literature is a bore, and it does not work for me with Ancient Greek because Ancient Greek does not have enough texts. Just today I discovered that the word βεβώς (transliterated as, I suppose, bebws) occurs but seven times in all of Greek literature, 6 times in Euripides and once in Sophocles [using tools at perseus dot org]. Ancient Greek has no Proust or War and Peace or Harry Potter or Steig Larsen, so I have to use intensive techniques, including Iversen's word lists, as well as vocabulary apps like Cram and Study Stack to "engage with the language," as Kaufman puts it.

Wow, that is so interesting. Is it known what the total word count of available "genuine" Ancient Greek is?

Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Posted: Thu Nov 02, 2017 6:11 pm
by Iversen
You could try the translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone into Ancient Greek by professor emeritus Andrew Wilson - it's quite long and probably easier to read than the poems of Hómēros. And you can use Mrs. Rawlings' alternative version to guide you through the more obscure passages.

As for the total number of words: "The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek is the English translation of Franco Montanari’s Vocabolario della Lingua Greca. With an established reputation as the most important modern dictionary for Ancient Greek, it brings together 140,000 headwords taken from the literature, papyri, inscriptions and other sources of the archaic period up to the 6th Century CE, and occasionally beyond."

I have also seen a fat Ancient Greek-Danish dictionary (some 6 or 7 centimeters thick) from 1885 by Carl Berg, but it only claims to contain around 50.000 words and 11.000 expressions, which nevertheless brings it on a par with dictionaries for modern languages in the same series. Since I only study modern Greek I haven't bought it ... yet. And yes, I'm impressed with the energy and tenacity of these old lexicologists from the 19. century. Nowadays people think that they can get machines to do all the hard word, but just try to imagine the work that mr. Berg had to do to compile a dictionary using only his fountain pen and innumerable pieces of paper!

PS: I have absolutely no idea about the total number of words in preserved texts in Ancient Greek, and I doubt that anybody else has a serious estimate.

Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Posted: Thu Nov 02, 2017 6:30 pm
by reineke
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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2017 7:25 pm
by MorkTheFiddle
Seneca wrote:Wow, that is so interesting. Is it known what the total word count of available "genuine" Ancient Greek is?

According to The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG®) maintained by the University of California, Irvine,
Today the Online TLG contains more than 110 million words from over 10,000 works associated with 4,000 authors...

(Source: The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG®), http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/tlg.php, accessed 3 November 2017) Only individual or institutional subscribers can access the full database, but I am not a subsciber*, so I can't say who the authors are or what the works are. Ancient Greek writing begins with Homer and includes both literary texts and technical treatises (Euclid, Hippocrates, for example), the Bible, and patristic writings. The number of words in the Perseus collection is 13,507,448 words. Obviously "words" in both corpuses means individual words, and equally obviously a lot of those words will be very frequent words like the Greek equivalent of "and," "the," and so on.

* Subscriptions for individuals are $140.00 for one year or $400.00 for three years. https://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/indivaccounts/signup

Iversen wrote:You could try the translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone into Ancient Greek by professor emeritus Andrew Wilson - it's quite long and probably easier to read than the poems of Hómēros. And you can use Mrs. Rawlings' alternative version to guide you through the more obscure passages.

As for the total number of words: "The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek is the English translation of Franco Montanari’s Vocabolario della Lingua Greca. With an established reputation as the most important modern dictionary for Ancient Greek, it brings together 140,000 headwords taken from the literature, papyri, inscriptions and other sources of the archaic period up to the 6th Century CE, and occasionally beyond."


Ancient Greek nouns can have as many as 11 forms, adjectives 23 forms, and verbs 740 forms. (Don't bet your life savings on the accuracy of my numbers, but they're close). That having been said, 13,000,000 words, after taking out the most common words which will make up 75-80% of the total, can easily be generated by the number 140,000 that Iversen cites for the headwords in Montanari’s Vocabolario della Lingua Greca.

As for the Harry Potter novel that Prof. Wilson translated into Ancient Greek, if I had the slightest shred of interest in fantasy, children or otherwise, I would take it up. But I do appreciate the suggestion and the reference:

reineke wrote:Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone – Ancient Greek Edition
By J.K. Rowling
Translated by Andrew Wilson

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2005/2005-08-07.htmls

Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2017 8:07 pm
by DaveBee
Cavesa wrote:Extensive reading and listening works, we have various examples of Super Challenge progress here on the forums. It works the best when associated with other kinds of studying.
There was a lecture recently about how babies learn language. If I recall correctly the current theory is that they store huge chunks of speech they have heard in their memory, and then use statistical matching to isolate words and phrases from that.


lecture: Comment se fait l'acquisition du langage chez le bébé? [EDIT: 43 minutes into the video]

Sharon Peperkamp (lady giving the lecture)

Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2017 11:43 pm
by Carmody

Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 7:21 pm
by MorkTheFiddle

How translators think is always interesting, and how they think about a work as ancient and as venerable as The Odyssey doubly so. My take on the tale has been for a long time that it is a fairy tale in reverse: man leaves beautiful woman, great sex and complete leisure to return to wife. Odysseus does not seem to me to be "complicated," no matter what the roots of the word may be. He takes many turns because he is hounded by Poseidon, making his story fall more under the rubric of "well-made plans gang aft agley," that even a man as crafty as Odysseus can't count on his plans always working out. Though he does get home, with some help from Athena.
I do agree with Wilson that the word someone translates as "whores" means nothing more or less than "slaves," who are without recourse or resource about serving new masters. Especially after ten years.
Women and the classics. My French classes were filled mostly with women (which is one of the reasons I signed up), but my first college Latin course had no women at all (out of maybe 20 students).
Finally, Tolkien faced the same prejudice, bordering on contempt, about his non-academic publishing as Wilson faces.
Thought-provoking article. Thanks for the reference.

Edit: er, a mod might want to move this off-topic response to a different thread.

Edit 1 time

Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Posted: Mon Nov 06, 2017 5:54 pm
by DaveBee
Iversen wrote: ... so taking that into account, it seems that just reading and/or listening without any specific attempt to learn new words isn't very efficient. Tests using multiple choice only test passive knowledge - and even passive knowledge with an outside help source. 'Open' questions are much closer to testing active knowledge, even though some variants (like cloze questions) do provide you with a context.

On the other hand we know from other sources that heavy readers have larger vocabularies than those that never read a book or something more demanding than SMS messages or street signs. How come? Well, the point could be that if you do read with your mind set to sucking up new words and constructions then you may also get something from extensive reading or listening. If you just read/listen to get the gist and let the concrete words fly through your head without any attempt to retain anything, then you probably won't learn anything new about the language in question - which doesn't preclude the possibility that you may remember some information about the topic. But you could also end up having a hard time even remembering what the topic was .. like when you forget you dreams unless you deliberately try to remember them.

There may be individual differences insofar that some persons are better to remembering ephemeral tidbits of information than others, but I personally have to get things down on paper and repeat them a couple of times to make them stick. And that includes new vocabulary. And I prefer wordlists because I there also can control how and when I do my repetitions. SRS programs would make me feel like a human dartboard.
I've noticed that if I watch/listen a short <25mins TV/radio programme I'm more likely to re-listen to parts I find difficult, or which contain an interesting phrase. With longer programmes I might listen to the whole thing again, but I would almost never isolate just a tricky part.

Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Posted: Wed Nov 08, 2017 12:48 am
by MorkTheFiddle
DaveBee wrote:There was a lecture recently about how babies learn language. If I recall correctly the current theory is that they store huge chunks of speech they have heard in their memory, and then use statistical matching to isolate words and phrases from that. lecture: Comment se fait l'acquisition du langage chez le bébé? Sharon Peperkamp (lady giving the lecture)

I listened to this fascinating lecture last night (6 Nov 2017). Among other questions that it prompted concerned older learners picking up the unique sounds of an L2. Do we learn to distinguish them anew from scratch, or is there some residual memory from the time before we were six months old that we reactivate?
And I had to smile at Peperkamp's use of the English word 'whatever.' :)
Thanks for the reference.

Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 5:34 pm
by Voytek
rdearman wrote:If you want to learn new words. You want to learn them in context. You don't want to use SRS or lists. Then you just need to read, a lot. Read, read, read, read. You'll learn the word in context, you'll not have to bother with electronic stuff, and you can visually see it on the page. It is what people did before computers, so we know it will work.


And don't forget about using the audio simultanieously in order not to destroy your pronunciation but to improve it.