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?