Learn a Language - Example: Greek

Ok, so you decided you want to learn a language. You've read an introductory book, went through some audio course. Now what? Vocabulary! Some pointers to get you started.

You can use a vocabulary trainer, preferably one with spaced repetition, either on-line, e.g. memrise or offline e.g. with anki.

For many languages, there are vocabulary lists available which you can download, import, and study. These lists can be more or less useful, well or badly curated, so as a beginner you often don't know how much noise you are studying.

What you want are vocabulary lists that list the most important words, preferably grouped into subject categories, so you can study them, understand them in context, and apply them. This is the optimal case, but not the usual one. If you have to create you own lists, there are several ways to start:

1. learning by doing: as you go and interact in the language you note down the words and enter them in a list.
2. import the most frequent words and learn them.

If you edit word lists for yourself, because there can be many misunderstandings, failed lookups, and misspellings, to name just a few sources of error there can be a lot of noise. Also it's a lot of work to curate a list.

There are many word lists, some of which well curated, which you can use. You can even use automatic dictionary lookup to create your lists, e.g. using freedict. You can also make use of word frequency lists or subsets of vocabularies such as Basic English.

In the following code example, I show how to create a word list of 250 Greek Verbs, filtered from a curated list by word frequency.

I downloaded both files as el_word_frequency.txt and Greek_verbs.txt. Words in the frequency file are ordered by frequency.

#!/bin/bash rm -f most_frequent_verbs.txt # output file
for word in $(cat el_word_frequency.txt | awk '{print $1}')
do
echo "word: ${word}"
found=$(grep -i "^${word}," Greek_verbs.txt)
if [ $? -ne 1 ]
then # found
echo "identified as Verb with meaning"
found=$(echo "$found" | head -n 1)
echo "${found}" >> most_frequent_verbs.txt
#echo "${found}"
fi
echo "found: ${found}"
done
head -n 250 most_frequent_verbs.txt | sed -e "s/\(^[^ ,\/]*\).*$/\1/" > most_frequent_verbs500.txt1
head -n 250 most_frequent_verbs.txt | sed -e "s/.*\([0-9][0-9]*\|vt\|vi\)[\., ]*\(.*\)$/\2/" > most_frequent_verbs500.txt2
paste most_frequent_verbs500.txt1 most_frequent_verbs500.txt2 > most_frequent_verbs500.txt

I also generated sound files for audio vocabulary courses, however the result of the automatic text-to-speech for Greek was too bad to be useful.

Please also see my post on speed reading to get more ideas.

I wish you success and fun! If you have any improvements or similar ideas, I might be interested in hearing about them.