[Course Forum] 5000 Important words in Greek

Hello,

I’ve been an enthusiastic user of the Greek vocab. course for the past few months. Thank you so much for all your work! It’s a fantastic resource for all the wannabe Greek speakers out there :slight_smile:

I noticed that the word total has been ticking up lately. That’s great! And then the thought crossed my mind if you’d considered using Longman’s 3000 most common words in English as a guide for new words? It’s a statistically driven data set that’s available online. I, and perhaps some other learners, would be very happy to help with the input.

Best Wishes,
Tim

PS There’s also a Longman’s 5000 if we make it that far

Tim,

Thanks for your enthusiasm. We do put a lot of work into making this a good and useful course. It has come a long way since I took it over from the original author (memakiano), with a lot of help from @nphx @spdl79 @monika.sofronow67.

My initial reaction is that I’m not a big fan of statistical word lists, especially those in alphabetical order and I don’t think they are a useful tool for language learning. We’ve actually had this discussion (some might say argument :slight_smile: ) off and on for the past two years or so. The structure of the course was long-established and really much too big to change (currently there are 89 Levels). And FWIW each Level takes at least 1 hour to build with the sound and the context sentences, etc.

What I would be in favor of is continuing to add words that users submit that are not already in the course. But, given the structure of it sometimes it is very hard to find which word is in which Level (this is actually a Memrise thing and not particular to this course per se). I am currently compiling an updated list (in MS Word) of all the words so far in the course to aid and assist in that effort.

So, all that said, by all means, find words you think are useful/important to know, not because they are used a lot in English, but because they’d be useful to know in Greek (which are not necessarily the same thing IMHO). But, please submit them in batches rather than one at a time. The best format is:

Greek Word, including articles -tab- English Meaning(s), can be multiple -tab- Part of Speech -tab- Gender -tab- Context Sentence or Example

I create these as tables in MS Word, as this makes it much easier to import. New learners may find the Context Sentences hard to come up with, but check out the Lexilogos online dictionary and Glosbe. There are many great examples to be found. Or try providing a “simple” English sentence using the word and we’ll see about translating it.

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As a Greek learner, and a person who practises speaking on a fairly regular basis, I can say without a doubt that using this memrise course is incredible for the learning and retrieval of words. It even gets to the point where I would see or hear a word in English, and I immediately translate it in my head with zero effort (this is thanks to the speed recall practise). So as for reaching fluency, this is an invaluable method.
Thanks for adding more words, and improving this course. I would love to help out at some point in the future!

Also to actually contribute to what’s being discussed: Using the most used English words does make sense. However if you can find satistical data for the most used Greek words, that’s arguably better.

Alexi

Hello again,

I agree with you about learning words in alphabetical order - that would be dull. And the words most used in English will necessarily be different from the Greek. But on the other hand, there will be similarities also. So I was wondering how do you decide which words to add to the list?
Wouldn’t it be great if the list could extend onwards and here’s a resource that’s already been compiled (albeit for a different language). If a few people were willing we could divide up the alphabet (A-C, D-F, etc etc) and add the words missing from the Greek list (but mixed up)?
I reached 1500 words surprisingly quickly and just loved daily rhythm of it. So not wanting it to stop, I thought of this v imperfect idea. Forgive me if it’s a dumb one. Like I say, I’m just a beginner so there are probably good reasons for this not to work.
Anyway thanks again,
Tim

G’day Alexi and Tim! Welcome on board.

I’d be inclined to agree that structuring the course using words by frequency might be a good idea - if we were starting from scratch. However, Neal’s completely right in that the course is already far too established and complex to change in this way.

Also, I don’t know if you’ve had a go at creating any of your own courses, but the back end of Memrise is nowhere near as user-friendly as the front end.

Anyway, having said that, if you wanted to get involved, what you could do is to start working your way through a frequency list (or anything else you’ve learned), seeing if the word is already here in the course, and if not, providing it to Neal.

The Search on Memrise leaves a lot to be desired. The below spreadsheet is a little out of date (think it only goes up to Level 75 - I need to update it), but I find it to be the best tool for running searches.

Heh, I usually spend my walk into work trying to rattle off everything I see in Greek :wink:

I don’t know if you’ve tried Duolingo yet, but their Greek course is pretty good too. It’s still in Beta, so there are a few bugs and annoyances (the first couple of levels in particular), but overall, it’s great. It’s very different to Memrise - Duo’s best for structure and grammar, Mem’s best for vocab and spelling - but I’m finding the combination of them to be great for learning.

Sean, I’m in the middle of updating the list right now, but was not really going to provide copies until I complete the current backlog, i.e. your 200+ words :slight_smile: I’ve made pretty good progress, but it will still take some time and I’m also thinking about added your Building Blocks material which I’ve already mined from your course. Once I finish formatting the downloaded list (through 89?) I’ll let you know.

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Είναι πολύ καλή ερώτηση! As Sean said, we started with the course already defined, it already had 1692 words in it. Although called (originally) “1692 most important words in Greek”, they are in fact not the 1692 most important words in Greek. It’s a long story. But, we had so many users/learners enrolled it seemed a better use of our time to try to fix what we had and then just keep adding to it. When we started there were no articles, sound, context examples, etc. What it had going for it was a lot of users. So, we went through the entire course and added all that material. People kept asking about word frequency, etc., but as has been mentioned the structure is what it is, and the ordering cannot be changed. Besides even if it were possible people keep arguing about the order, and there was for a while endless complaints about words that some didn’t consider important. See @spdl79 comment above for the inside joke:

to which I always reply “every word is important”, sometimes followed by “if you don’t want to learn it, then don’t”. There is a way in Memrise to suppress words you might think are useless to you. But I’ll bet you that if you read Χάρι Πότερ ( Χάρι Πότερ - Βικιπαίδεια ) in Greek, you’ll need to know κλεψύδρα!

So, to address your actual question, at least for my part I just keep adding batches of basic that I know or am learning that I find are not in the course. I continued to be horrified at how many basic words aren’t here (yet)! Sean recently dumped a course that he’s been working on and gave it to me and I’ve been adding for the past few days. It’s a long slow process, even when have a list of words. You have to create an Alt for all the Greek nouns and adjectives because we want to present every noun with its article, but not require that for testing, hence an Alt is required. We also want all adjective forms available as valid answers when testing, so we have masculine shown, with feminine and neuter as Alts. If the words have several meanings and many certainly do, then an Alt is required for each “other” meaning. Then I look them up in Lexilogos or Glosbe and make sure the genders are correct, they’re not always obvious. Then I get the audio pronunciation from Forvo and if necessary, doctor up the sound if it is poor. Finally I look for a context sentence in either Lexilogos or Glosbe. You can see how it easily takes an hour or more just to do a single Level. What we’re all looking for is quality, the course used to be frankly pretty crappy, people were complaining all the time, the original author never replied to a single comment on inquiry.

So, now, if you want to provide lists of words that you know aren’t in the course (see my previous comments), then please by all means. They can be any words that as a learner you want to know. That’s what I do, taking words from my weekly lessons, from the texts I’m using and from notes I’ve taken. I keep asking myself “well why isn’t this words in the course?” Of course, this is rhetorical. There is no answer to that question. If you really want to learn a bit about why the 1692 are what they are, I suggest you visit Harry Foundalis’ web site: Greek Language This is where the original list came from. Apparently Harry thought these the most important words, but as you by now are learning, the list is almost endless! As I mentioned to Sean in another post I’ll have an MS Word version (or maybe Excel) available of all the words in the course soon and am more than happy to provide it to anyone who wants it. One caveat to the list is that it only lists the primary Greek and primary English version of the words, there is no way to dump all of the Alts. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be any kind of database export function :frowning:

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Thanks Neal!

Welcome @spdl79 . Could you do me a favor and ‘dump’ the contents of the Miscellany course? It would save me a lot of time for the parts of speech etc. I want to begin to include that content as well.

Progress Update: The word count is now at 2,265 - but note that Levels 88-92 are under construction still - so use at your own risk as they’ll be undergoing a lot of change soon, but not likely today! As mentioned earlier I will provide a copy of the MS Excel sheet with all the words including Level numbers (but no Alts) as soon as I finish up the Levels just added.

No problem, here you go:

https://mega.nz/#!L8lTkC6T!-K8xmejAi4cVO2wTjjvEK4SNMFFnUBRtw3hCPXc5fzc

Obviously if working into 1692 you’ll need to find some way to differentiate (or Alt) all the various thats, ifs, untils etc.

There goes my week off work :wink:

That’d be great!

Thanks, got it! I don’t know how I’ll work it into the course, will have to think on it. I could just ignore any that are Alts and see if we have any matches in the primary Greek words. I’ll have to think about it for a while. I have enough to keep me busy with the rest of Orphans.

Week off from work? Nice, get outside and enjoy it!

You know you’ve done a fantastic job with it. It’s an amazing resource. Thank you so much! Like I say, I only want to help add more so that we can continue learning. So I’ll wait for your spreadsheet. When that arrives, I’ll start compiling words from the Longman 3000 that aren’t on the existing “mother list”. Then send in the format that you asked. My next question is – are there any other course users who might be interesting in crowd-working on this sidebar? How to ask?

OK, sounds good. Thanks.

One way to inquire is simply post a message here with the user name preceded by an @, like so: @Timtz75

I’m not sure if you use any Memrise username or if they have to have participated in the Forum system. Give it a try.

Hi,

Don’t know if this has already been reported, if so my apologies for reposting.

Anyway, in level 12, ‘unclear’ is given as the translation for μπερδεμένος, it used to be συγκεχυμένος, and ασαφής was also an option. I know these words are all somewhat similar, but maybe it would help to distinguish between them:

(All translations taken from Stavropoulos)

μπερδεμένος: muddled, entangled, confused, jumbled, mixed-up, messed-up, complicated, intricate.
Είναι όλα τόσο μπερδεμένα. It’s all so messed-up.
συγκεχυμένος: confused, muddled, turbid, woolly, vague, hazy, foggy, indistinct, blurred
Έχω μόνο τις συγκεχυμένες αναμνήσεις. I’ve only got vague memories.
ασαφής: vague, ambiguous, indefinite, equivocal
Μια ασαφής απάντηση. An ambiguous reply.

Taking this into account, I would change the translations to the following:
μπερδεμένος: confused, messed-up, complicated.
συγκεχυμένος: unclear, vague, indistinct
ασαφής: ambiguous, equivocal

Don’t know what you guys think? Thanks for all the hard word, let me know if you need help with anything.

Welcome on board, MPoorter!

As far as I’m aware, συγκεχυμένος and ασαφής aren’t in the course at all any more, so it’d be great to get them in.

σαφής is (as ‘clear’, Level 41), but its opposite isn’t.

Not everyone reads the boards, I guess, so perhaps Neal could add something on the course description about how users are welcome to nominate words for inclusion?

The only problem with modifying the course description is that it is pretty full now because we have to put the ‘lengthy’ link to this forum since Memrise has seen fit not to provide a place for a proper link to the Forum!! That said (was I venting? :slight_smile: )

The Description currently has this type of suggestion:

Currently: 2,265 words! Course forum: http://community.memrise.com/t/course-forum-1692-most-important-words-in-greek - Please share feedback, corrections and additions, we have grown the course well beyond the original 1692 words! Includes: complete audio, articles, parts of speech, genders, adjectives in m/f/n forms, and numerous corrections. Not a basic Greek course, but will help you build a decent vocabulary in your journey to acquire more Greek.

If you think there might be a better way to organize this, please suggest. The other problem with the Description is that html is not supported so I can’t format it and made things stand out or look batter.

[quote=“MPoorter, post:178, topic:817”]
Stavropoulos
[/quote] - I assume Stavropoulos is a dictionary? I personally use Φυτράκη or Oxford.

[quote=“MPoorter, post:178, topic:817”]
μπερδεμένος
[/quote] is already in the course. The primary definition is ‘unclear’, Alt is ‘confused’ - Looking this up in other sources I found:
Lexilogos - confused, tangled
Glosbe - confused, tricky, intricate
Φυτράκη - tangled, mixed-up, confusing
Given these 3 plus yours, I’m changing the Primary to ‘confused’ with the others as Alts.

[quote=“MPoorter, post:178, topic:817”]
συγκεχυμένος
[/quote] - added in Level 92 - as unclear, vague, etc. I’ve used your example because either way you translate it in this context it means the same thing.

[quote=“MPoorter, post:178, topic:817”]
ασαφής
[/quote] - added in Level 92 - as ‘vague’, ‘ambiguous’, ‘fuzzy’ - used your example.