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Advice about learning declensions? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| rggg Heptaglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 6326 days ago 373 posts - 426 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Malay Studies: Romanian, Catalan, Greek, German, Swedish | Message 1 of 16 10 August 2007 at 12:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi!!!
Does anyone have some kind of technique, advice, tip or anything related to the learning of Greek declension? I know that the first advice could be TO STUDY AND PRACTICE :) What I mean is special drills or exercises that could speed up a little bit the learning process of declension endings, etc. and help to start "thinking in Greek". Greek being the first language I ever study with this feature, it's getting really hard, but at the same time I'm getting more and more interested. Thanks in advance!!!!! Edited by rggg on 15 November 2007 at 10:23am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6471 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 2 of 16 10 August 2007 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For Modern Greek, I presume? Anyway the advice is the same.
I'm studying Modern Greek and I only familiarize myself with some basic patterns I can find in the declensions, not actually memorizing it all. For example, I'd notice: - that singular masculine nouns end in -ς in some way or other for Nominative, they lose this ending in Genitive and Accusative and just end in whatever vowel came before that - that singular feminine nouns add the -ς for Genitive and stay the same in Accusative - neuter nouns seem to be governed by the same two rules as Latin neuter nouns: they are always the same in Nominative and Accusative and in plural Nominative/Accusative they end in -α in some way or another ... If however you want to actually memorize the exact declension, the tried-and-true method used by Latin students all over Germany is to take one example word per declension, something well-known like maybe άντρας, ώρα, σπίτι or θέμα, and to recite the forms one after the other, e. g. "ώρα ώρας ώρα - ώρες ωρών ώρες". Once you develop a rhythm or even melody to the recitation, you won't forget it anymore. This can be done in under 10 minutes. What's important for this method to work: 1. two-syllable words are best, too long words will break the rhythm 2. choose words that are very familiar to you and that are truly representative of the declension, none that are in any way irregular 3. don't choose words that are very similar, e. g. φίλος and φίλη would be bad because you could then confuse the forms. 4. always use the same order of cases 5. if unsure what case a word is or what the right form for a word of your choice is, recall the sample word in your mind, go through its forms and stop at the one you need, then change it to the word you actually need. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6696 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 3 of 16 12 August 2007 at 3:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hm. With Russian, our teacher just wanted us to understand what the cases did. She didn't worry too much about the actual endings, let us make a chart with them all written down on it, and use it during tests.
Sure enough, we all just ended up picking it up on our own time. I guess that if you can predict where teh declensions are and what case they need to signify, you should just be able to assimilate the endings. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| rggg Heptaglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 6326 days ago 373 posts - 426 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Malay Studies: Romanian, Catalan, Greek, German, Swedish | Message 4 of 16 13 August 2007 at 9:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you guys, your posts are highly appreciated.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7104 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 5 of 16 13 August 2007 at 9:50am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not in Germany but I can confirm that I learnt Latin case endings in exactly this way in the 70s - I haven't looked at a Latin textbook since I left secondary school in 1980 and I can still remember them. Andy 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6895 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 16 15 August 2007 at 7:50am | IP Logged | |||||
Same here for Spanish verb forms, also in the 70's. I basically banged away at them until I knew them forwards and backwards without any hesitation. It took a lot more than 10 minutes but it was worth it. Edited by Hencke on 16 August 2007 at 5:22am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 16 11 October 2007 at 4:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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My advice is: write your own tables in a simplified form on a piece of cardboard, which you then keep within sight for quick reference everytime you are in doubt about something, for instance a strange form you meet in a text. When I say 'simplified' I mean that you shouldnt clutter the tables with a lot of parallel columns just because of a few exceptions, - it is more important to keep the tables clear and simple than to cover every single word in Greek. A special problem with Greek is the persistence of outdated Katherevousa forms. You may meet them in formal writing, but treat them as exceptions, write them in another color or just ignore them until you have learnt the basic forms of modern Dhimotiki.
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