Here is a program I wrote to practice Greek (and Latin) vocabulary. It can ask you either Greek or English, and when it shows the correct answer, you tell it whether you got the word right or wrong. If asking Greek (or Latin), it can show only a single principal part of a verb, then show you all parts along with the answer. You can record example sentences for each word. As you use it, it remembers your right and wrong answers, so it can ask the tougher words more often. It uses a database of text files, so you can easily add your own words. It comes with vocabulary from Homer and the New Testament. There are many options, which you can set on the command line or in a configuration file. It runs on Java 5.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a year. I’ve continued to improve it, but I’ve never gotten around to bundling it all up. I really only wrote it for my own use, but it seems useful enough to share. You’ll probably need some patience to get it installed. I’ve tested it on Windows before, but usually I run it on Linux. I’ll be happy to help if you email me. My address is “verba” at this domain name. Perhaps having it “in the wild” will encourage me to wrap it in a nice package.

Suppose you expand the tar file into a directory named verba-0.5. You should see three files: commons-lang-1.0.1.jar, log4j-1.2.8.jar, and verba.jar. Now suppose you expand the Homer vocab files into verba-0.5/words. From the verba-0.5 directory, you can run the program with something like this:

java -classpath verba.jar com.pjungwir.verba.SwingUI -l 50 -s -r words/homer*

The -l option takes a number. It is the number of words to use. The -s option means to split principal parts and show only one when asking the question. The -r option means verba should repeat incorrect words after asking a few intervening questions, to see if you’re learning anything.

The first run will create a “.grkrc” config file, probably in your home directory. You can edit it to avoid typing all the same options every time.

If you’re just beginning, I recommend using only one vocab file at first, then adding another, then another, and so on. The Homer and New Testament sets are arranged from most frequent to least frequent, based more or less on Homeric Vocabularies by Owen and Goodspeed and Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek by Metzger. The Homer files exclude a lot of really easy words, which you should have learned if you went through Hanson & Quinn. The New Testament files include everything, but they aren’t quite done. They are missing some of the rarer words.

Things I’m working on include:

• A graphical control panel to edit the configuration file.
• Support for any conjugation of verbs and any declension of nouns, adjectives, and friends. This will only be tractable if I can write a utility that parses the basic word and gives you a pretty good list of all forms, which you can then go and correct by hand if necessary. So far it seems very doable, and an interesting problem.
• Oh yeah—an easy install procedure!

Here is the program itself:

verba-0.5.tar.gz (1.5 MB)

Here are vocab files for Homer:

homer-vocab-text.tar.gz (28 KB)

Here are vocab files for the New Testament:

nt-vocab-text.tar.gz (24 KB)

Here are vocab files for Wheelock:

latin-vocab-text.tar.gz (16 KB)

You may also be interested in my mp3 files for Wheelock vocabulary.