I have been following with some interest the discussion on the value of
lists. I have sort have been working on greek for some three years now on
my own. I too have the same problem with the vocabularies. I can go
through a whole stack of cards and get almost all of them. Yet when I read
a text, often even though most of the words should be familiar to me, I
have to really concentrate on what the sentence means.
What I have done here lately, is look to analyse a sentence as far as I can
without looking at references to the point of forming hypotheses as to what
a word means based on how it is used in the sentence. Often, this goes
into a notebook. Then I start looking at lexicons and my references. I
have found these sessions to be great learning experiences.
I noticed some discussions as to good lexicons. I have a lexicon by Joseph
Thayer. Any opinions of it compared to others? Also, I was thinking of
tackling some classical greek texts, any suggestions for a general lexicon
as opposed to one which focuses on the N.T.
Also, I noticed a discussion of "principal parts". In three greek books
I've used so far, one used the notion of "principal parts" to expain how
the verbs work. The other two attempt predict what the verbs will look
like starting with the stem. I personally find the principal parts thing a
little heavy on the memorization. Any thoughts on the value of one system
over another?
Chuck