Re: Lists

Mary L B Pendergraft (pender@wfu.edu)
Mon, 11 May 1998 10:42:04 -0400

I believe that one useful way to use most-frequenty-encountered vocabulary
lists is not to learn a single gloss for them, as many of you have pointed
out, but to require students to master them early on: forms as well as
translation. My Plato students tried this route this semester, and we all
found it produced good results. Because they'd had to master the principal
parts of PEITHW, PASXW, PIPTW and so on, the look-alike forms generated
fewer problems than usual.

This approach could apply to individual study as well: identify the verbs
that recur most frequently, and learn their parts. Identify the nouns that
recur most frequently, and learn their gender and declension.

The more basic information you have in your head and not just on the
bookshelf, the more pleasurable your reading becomes.

Mary

Mary Pendergraft
Associate Professor of Classical Languages
Wake Forest University
Winston-Salem NC 27109-7343
336-758-5331 (NOTE: this is a new number) pender@wfu.edu