I'm studying Modern Greek and trying to expand my vocabulary by studying word frequency lists. I know you can do word families etc. to make it easier but I thought, wouldn't it be nice to do something somehow based on the principles of RTK1?

Maybe make a list of the most common syllables of the language and pretend they're kanji or something so that I could use "imaginative memory."

Has anyone done anything like this?

If you want to do it with a non logographic language, you would make mnemonics based off of morphemes.

RandomQuotes Wrote:If you want to do it with a non logographic language, you would make mnemonics based off of morphemes.

Dumb question...can you give me a few examples of Greek morphemes? (or some other language like French). Thanks.

I'm not overly familiar with Greek, but for French, things like aéro-, équi-, hippo-, -ette, and -ai, would be morphemes.

Morphemes are what you call basic units of meaning that are smaller than words. "Smaller" = "small" + "er" (2 morphemes). "International" = "inter" + "nation" + "al" (three morphemes). "終わってしまった" = "終わっ" + "て" + "しまっ" + "た" (four morphemes, according to MeCab/Ipadic, which is a morphological parser).

So assuming morphemes in Greek combine sensibly into whole words, and you have a morphological parser (either computerized or manual, i.e., your brain), you can break the ~2000 most common Greek words into morphemes and see if there's a high degree of reuse of those morphemes between words. If there is, then you can learn them individually.

This is an interesting idea. Ordinary language study involves learning the morphemes organically through the process of learning vocabulary and noticing patterns. For well-structured languages, this might boost learning & retention rates.

aldebrn Wrote:Morphemes are what you call basic units of meaning that are smaller than words. "Smaller" = "small" + "er" (2 morphemes). "International" = "inter" + "nation" + "al" (three morphemes). "終わってしまった" = "終わっ" + "て" + "しまっ" + "た" (four morphemes, according to MeCab/Ipadic, which is a morphological parser).

So assuming morphemes in Greek combine sensibly into whole words, and you have a morphological parser (either computerized or manual, i.e., your brain), you can break the ~2000 most common Greek words into morphemes and see if there's a high degree of reuse of those morphemes between words. If there is, then you can learn them individually.

This is an interesting idea. Ordinary language study involves learning the morphemes organically through the process of learning vocabulary and noticing patterns. For well-structured languages, this might boost learning & retention rates.

Thanks. I'll take a look at this. Anything at all that would help me remember the vocabulary would be most welcome.