It's all Greek to me (sorry, couldn't resist)

[theyellowhobbit]

Unfortunately, my academic bravado, which normally serves as a way for me not to stress out too much (at least in theory) since I can tell myself I always manage to do well with not too much studying, was my downfall, in that I was totally not prepared for my Greek quiz on Friday. Whereas dsKC spent more time studying and didn't get to the homework I did the homework and didn't get to the studying.

It's my own damn fault. And I would have had enough time, even with the swing dancing, had I just buckled down and studied all of Thursday afternoon when I got out of work.

So I talked to the prof after the first break, and told him how I was totally unprepared and felt really bad about not putting enough effort in. He asked if the memorizing thing was not my style of learning, and I said more that I had gotten used to sorta translating intuitively with my German, which worked fairly well. However, in German you get a dictionary. And I actually had the vocab itself down. But I didn't have the paradigms of declining¹ nouns and adjectives and conjugating verbs down. I.E. I didn't have those tables memorized as I should. I could probably translate the sentence easy enough and figure out cases from context, but in terms of reproducing it, I was not prepared. At all. And I apologized.

He said it wasn't the biggest deal in the world, though in the semester courses they let you drop the lowest quiz grade which obviously is impossible here. And quizzes are 20% of the grade. So I basically just need to ace everything else. Though then again, not getting an A (as long as I get something in the B range) would not be the end of the world, considering I've passed my language requirement already.

Unfortunately, I can sometimes be somewhat of a perfectionist (which doesn't go well with procrastination) and I'm still going to try for an A, even if it kills me.

So from now on, I'm doing a lot more studying. Our next quiz is a week from tomorrow since Friday is the 4th of July. Yet I'm still going to the house party. This means that Tuesday and Thursday are study days, as is Sunday whenever I get back. And I have to study on the train/bus/however I'm getting down there.


¹For those of you who have never taken a language with cases, I'll give the analogy that declining nouns and adjectives is like conjugating verbs, except that whereas conjugation tells you the tense, mood, number, person, and voice, declining tells you the grammatical purpose of the word. So the nominative case is the direct object, the genitive is possessive/descriptive (in the phrase "Rachelism of Doom" the "of doom" would be genitive, dative is the indirect object ("I gave the box to your mom" "your mom" would be in the dative) and accusative is the direct object (in the same phrase, "the box" would be accusative). It's also done with endings. And with adjectives, the case is the same as the noun it's modifying.

There's also a vocative case, if you're speaking to someone, but we don't really need to know it, which is nice. There's no vocative in German.

Comments

[eponis.livejournal.com]

That sounds, um, exactly like my experiences with Greek. Including the part where I'm better at translating intuitively. (Which, incidentally, will be helpful pretty soon with Greek. It's much closer to Western languages than Hebrew, and easier to get good at guessing, once you have some basic grammar down.) All I can suggest is "flashcards, flashcards, flashcards," which I really don't like using, but which were the only way to keep up.

::hugs:: Good luck.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

For me, the act of writing helps me remember things. So I'm going to have to make those flashcards myself. And yeah, I definitely will need them. Note to self- buy index cards and a full-sized notebook tomorrow.

[eponis.livejournal.com]

Yup, I did the same (writing them myself). And found myself a cute flashcard holder, so I could take them around and look through them instead of reading a book in various in-between-times.

Beyond that, it's all about finding patterns in the grammar and root-word connections in the vocabulary.

. . . and now I'm going to stop lecturing and go back to footnote-writing. Again, good luck.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

At least when I was taking Latin (I've never taken Greek, and only a year of Latin), I thought the vocative was fun. On the other hand, that may have been partially because we got to translate anything in vocative as any of the following: hey x, oh x, excuse me x. I really enjoyed translating various Latin sentences with "excuse me x"...