Morphological Drill & Analysis

To test your knowledge of Ancient Greek there are several sets of exercises freely available on the net, although most of them are still in an experimental phase. For more advanced exercises, such as prose composition, see our section Advanced Study of the Language.

Morphological analysers:

Greek Word Study Tool

After typing a Greek form, this tool offers you a morphological analysis, or at least a survey of all possible solutions. If you are still in doubt, some indicative percentages are given.

Alpheios

The Alpheios-plugin does the same job as the Greek Word Study Tool of Perseus. One of the assets lies in the fact that it works within the browser itself. The tool allows everyone to analyse every single Greek word in Unicode.

To make reading and learning mankind's most beautiful and significant classical languages as easy and enjoyable as possible. The Alpheios Reading tools can currently be used with texts in Latin, ancient Greek and Arabic. […] The tools will work with ANY web page or other text that is in valid Unicoded HTML, including texts you create yourself. To use them simply click the "Toggle Alpheios on" option under the Alpheios icon on the Alpheios toolbar.

Diogenes

Off-line morphological analysis can be achieved thanks to the Diogenes-software. This software is very useful, especially in combination with the TLG-database (which is however not available free of charge).

Diogenes is a tool for searching and browsing the databases of ancient texts, primarily in Latin and Greek, that are published by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Packard Humanities Institute. […] Thanks to Perseus, Diogenes comes equipped with morphological analysis of Greek and Latin and Greek and Latin dictionaries. Click on a word and see its morphology and definition. […] Again, thanks to Perseus, Diogenes can do morphologically aware searching. […] Restricting searches to specific authors and works.

English and American sites:

Ancient Greek Tutorials: Accentuation Practice and Principal Parts

This excellent website, meant as a supplement to a handbook of Professor D. Mastronarde, contains two useful sets of exercises, one on accentuation and the other on the principal parts. In the first exercise of the former set you only have to name and explain accents, in the other six exercises you have to place them yourself. This is realized with an interesting application of Java-technology: for each word you have first to select the appropriate accent (acute, grave, circumflex) from a pop-up window, then to click above the designated syllable - on clicking a red accent appears on this place - and finally you can see the reason for the accent by clicking on the number of the item. For the numerous exercises on the principal parts the student can choose between a drill by unit, by alphabetical and type list or by random sets. Seeing the Indicative Present Active of each verb, he has to construct in his mind the Future Active, the Aorist Active (or Middle), the Perfect Active, the Perfect Middle or Passive and the Aorist Passive. By clicking on the "Show Next Form" button he gets the right answer. These exercises on the principal parts appear to be flawless and at the same time very efficient, although there is neither real interactivity nor an automatic score.

Song of the Lamb: New Testament Greek

This site contains vocabulary exercises as well as morphology drills (nouns, participles, the verb λύω) that are keyed to Basics of Biblical Greek, by William D. Mounce. Before each individual exercise the user has to select a chapter range from this excellent handbook. Then to parse a given form he has to check all the boxes that apply. In all drills, except for the vocabulary training, he can get an automatic and quite accurate evaluation of his answers by pressing the Test button (’Correct’, ’Tense does not match’, ’Gender does not match’ …). In general these exercises are very useful; therefore, it’s a pity that some of them contain errors which cannot be explained as accentuation mistakes or misspellings, e.g. τούτας and τούταις instead of ταύτας and ταύταις.

QuickMem Greek

QuickMem Greek has been used by thousands of people worldwide over the last fifteen years.
- Quickly memorize New Testament Greek vocabulary with this flash card program
- Frequency lists from Bruce Metzger's Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek
- Covers all words occurring ten or more times in the New Testament

This quiz program to test you on your New Testament Greek vocabulary can be freely downloaded, although you are asked to register on a voluntary basis. It comes with its own font and works with flashcards. The core of the program consists of 35 vocabulary lists, classified according to their frequency in the New Testament and based on B.M. Metzger, Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek. When you have selected one of these lists QuickMem Greek shows you a Greek word and after you have translated it in your mind you have to press the ’reveal’ button to get the correct answer and finally, if this corresponds with your own translation, you must press the ’correct’, otherwise the ’incorrect’ button. This last step is important because next time the program only repeats the questions you marked ’incorrect’. An interesting option allows you, after you have seen the right answer, to adjust the level of difficulty for a word with the ’Question Difficulty Slider’ (from 1 to 5), so as to select a difficulty level of your next training session with the ’Quiz Difficulty Slider’. This program, then, in contrast with Eulalie and the drills of Alvares, does not give an automatic score, but appeals to the student’s honesty and may be much more rewarding from a didactic point of view.

Wordbase Greek

Wordbase Greek is a flexible program mainly focused on Ancient Greek and New Testament Greek. However it is easy to use it also for Modern Greek.
Dictionary: Wordbase contains a dictionary with all 5393 words in the New Testament. An other wordlist contains the same words sorted according to frequency. There is also a Swedish-Greek dictionary and frequency list.
Flash card system: Use the dictionary to create new word lists or enter own text. Any word list can be used in the flash card system.
Hangman game: Another fun way of learning Greek is to use the Hangman game. It is also based on the word lists, the one shipped with Wordbase or the ones You create.

(by Dag Kihlman): version 3.1 of this sophisticated training program for New Testament Greek can now be freely downloaded. The program is based on 5393 flashcards organized in several glossaries: some of them are lexical (a list of the most common verbs, of the numbers, of the conjunctions and prepositions and even a dictionary of all 5393 words which covers the complete vocabulary of the New Testament), others are rather morphological (lists of suffixes of different types of verbs, a list of pronouns, ..). In practice, then, vocabulary training and training of verbal morphology can be done by two different types of drill: ordinary or word trial and hangman game. In a word trial the student chooses a selection from any of the glossaries and can indicate whether he wants to train these words from Greek to translaton or from translation to Greek. Also, he can choose the number of extra times the same question will be asked. During the session, when he has typed his answer, he can click at the ’Show answer’-button: now Wordbase shows the right answer but modestly lets the user free to decide on his own score. A hangman game is just an alternative and very funny way to test your knowledge of the same flashcards: just try it! In all these exercises a score is permanently shown on the screen and all mistakes can be automatically saved to a special error file which can then be treated as an additional glossary. This ingenious program offers numerous possibilities, such as the creation of one’s own flashcards and glossaries. The program comes with its own fonts, including some helpful documentation such as a keyboard layout showing how to type the Greek characters with breathings and accents.

Ancient Greek with Thrasymachus

(by Ann T. Wilkins and Alison W. Barker): this Supplement to the textbook Thrasymachus includes in almost all of its 32 sections useful sets of various types of exercises: they mainly consist of translation exercises (translation of simple Greek sentences into English), specific morphological drills (changing forms to the equivalent forms in another tense, voice, number, person or case) and exercises asking for the identification of inflected and verbal forms. By clicking on an "answer key"-link you get access to a pop-up-window with the correct answers. Although there is only one such answer key for a whole set of exercises and there is neither an automatic evaluation of your answer nor an automatic score, this allows at least for an honest checking of your own performance. The only flaw of these exercises are some accentuation errors. The authors promise to add more interactive exercises to which we are eagerly looking forward.

GREEK 101: Reading Greek

(by Marilyn A. Katz): this course, based on the J.A.C.T. textbook Reading Greek, is presented here with many useful drills and quizzes. As a help to memorize the vocabulary of the textbook there are several Greek to English and English to Greek vocabulary quizzes as well as electronic vocabulary cards, where the student has to click on a Greek word to turn the card over and on the English word to turn it back over. One drill involves the identification of the parts of speech in the book’s first reading text, in which each word is made clickable. But most of the drills are morphology charts of which the student has to click each item one by one to reveal the correct forms: to this category belong the definite article morphology web site, the web sites for the first, second and third declension, the pronouns website, the morphology charts for the Indicative and Imperative Active Present of παύω and the contract verbs and for the Indicative and Imperative Active Present and the other tenses of some irregular verbs, such as εἰμί, εἶμι and οἶδα. Finally there is a drill on the principal parts based on the same principle. The website on the correlatives is similar but here you have to give the translation of the Greek forms. Other more sophisticated interactive quizzes, some of them involving the dragging of the correct forms to the right place and provided with an automatic score, are the exercises on the correlatives, on the degrees of comparison, a general on-line verb drill and specific exercises on the infinitives and on the conjugation of εἰμί and εἶμι. Very useful too are the tests of the student’s knowledge of the contraction rules and of the noun suffixes. Most of these exercises are relatively simple but are well made and free of mistakes, making an ingenious use of Java technology.

Athenaze Supplementary Exercises

(by James F. Johnson): Prof Johnson, teaching several Greek and Latin courses at Austin College, has created these interactive exercises as a supplement to the well-known handbook //Athenaze. The exercises follow the chapters of the handbook - each of the first 24 chapters is already covered and the //Table of Contents makes clear that Johnson intends to provide exercises for all chapters - and include vocabulary flashcards, morphology drills and translation training. Although they contain some rare blunders such as ἔσεται instead of ἔσται (future tense of εἰμί), most of them are useful and well made in spite of the inherent limitations of the program used (HotPotatoes): part of them are multiple choice exercises with the program confirming when you have made the right choice and giving you an automatic score. For the translation exercises the student has to type an answer himself and the program accepts several possibilities: for example when I translated οἱ καλοὶ ἀγροί by "the beautiful fields" the program answered "Correct. These answers are also correct: THE FINE FIELDS, THE GOOD FIELDS". Moreover, the users who do not find immediately a translation can select the ’hint’-button, which helps them by revealing the first letter of the right answer. For most of these exercises the standard Symbol font is used (without diacritics!).

Things Having To Do With Learning Ancient Greek

(by Matt Neuburg): from this website can be freely downloaded some software designed as a help with the Cambridge textbook for beginners in Ancient Greek, //Reading Greek// (by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers). These stacks let students drill and test themselves on most of the exercises, and all of the forms and vocabulary, from the textbook; one utility allows this vocabulary to be sorted and consulted in ways likely to be useful to students and teachers, and creates flashcards. Another application (’Greek Verb Help’) presents a full paradigm of the Ancient Greek verb in hypertext format. It includes many notes warning about ambiguous or misleading forms. However, all these programs work exclusively on Macintosh.

Greek Drills from Jean Alvares

These drills are meant as exercises to be used with the Oxford textbook Athenaze. Apart from a whole series of specific vocabulary exercises there are about 24 different exercises on grammar, but they are all based on the same procedure: the student has to translate the Greek words appearing on his screen (often verbal forms or other words of a specific type) and the program replies with a "Yessssss!" or "No. It should be …". A running score of the number of correct and incorrect answers and an overall percentage of right answers appears in fields below. This type of drill looks very useful, but there are two inconveniences. First of all, the student must type exactly the translation as used in Athenaze, because synonyms or alternative translations are not recognized: for instance, as a translation of μικρός the program only accepts "small" and rejects "little". And, second, some exercises seem to contain errors or technical flaws. For example, when I rendered οἰκῶ by "I live" the program replied: "No, it should be you live, you dwell"!

German sites:

Griechische Formenübungen; Griechisch-deutsche Wortkunde

(by Egon Gottwein): this teacher from the Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium in Ludwigshafen offers here 42 sets of excellent exercises: each of them contains some 25 verbal forms, derived from specific verbal types, which the student should analyze and translate; below the same list of words is repeated, this time accompanied by the right solution. At the end of each exercise a second list of Greek forms is offered, which the student is now supposed to be able to analyze all on his own. These exercises are not easy especially because the verbal forms are sometimes mixed up with similar nominal forms. But in his introduction to these exercises Gottwein rightly stresses their usefulness as a preparation for the reading of Greek texts. Of the same top quality are the 84 cards or pages with basic vocabulay: they contain about 3000 words, ordered alphabetically as well as according to word families; three different levels of difficulty are indicated by different background colours. So both this vocabulary training and the morphological exercises, although they are not really interactive, are extremely useful by the way they are presented.

Formosus Graecus

FORMOSUS GRAECUS hilft Ihnen, die griechischen Wörter und Formen schnell und gründlich zu lernen, damit Sie den Kopf frei haben für die Inhalte des Textes - und natürlich, damit Sie Ihr GRAECUM bestehen!

Schnupperkurs griechisch

(by Peter Hemetsberger): This online course by an Austrian teacher contains some sets of very simple but useful interactive exercises. Some of them offer a pronunciation drill, for which the student has to translitterate Greek letters, combinations of letters and words, others are meant as exercises on conjugation and declension (only the Indicative Present Active and the second declension of the substantives) and ask the student to translate Greek forms into German. For each exercise the program not only reacts with "Die Antwort war richtig" or "Die Antwort war leider nicht richtig" but in the latter case adds some comment on the kind of mistake you have made (e.g. "Folgender Fehler ist aufgetreten: Es fehlen noch Wörter am Ende des eingegebenen Textes") and offers some help to find the correct answer by giving its first letters (compare with the hints given in Johnson’s Athenaze Supplementary Exercises). The Greek is made with GIF-files and contains only a few errata.

Ordner für den Sprachunterricht: Übungen

(by Theo Wirth): This Ordner, a supplement to the handbook Kantharos that can be downloaded as a set of PDF- or RTF-documents, offers a limited number of exercises, most of which are simple short sentences to be translated from Greek into German or the other way around. However, none of these exercises is interactive, so users have to find the right solution all by themselves.

French sites:

Eulalie (logiciel de vocabulaire grec)

(by Gabriel Teulières): a French program for training Ancient Greek vocabulary of which a third and improved version can be freely downloaded since June 2000. The installation of the program is easy and quick and its presentation is visually very attractive and user-friendly. It essentially consists of about 30 cards, each with 20 classical Attic words for training. The cards are conceived as thematical units (one about war-terminology, another on education, on the family, etc.) or focus on a specific word class (the μι-verbs, the prepositions, etc.). When you start a training session, you are asked to type the French translation of each word: each time the system replies with "Bonne réponse" or "Faux!", adds the correct translation and gives you an automatic score. The obvious disadvantage of this procedure is that the program cannot take into account alternative translations: for example, when I translated ἱερόν by ’temple’ the program rejected this and replied that the correct answer was ’sanctuaire’. Yet Teulières has clearly done his best to overcome this problem by providing many words with alternative translations. Moreover, the program allows you to add synonyms to the translations yourself; in a relatively simple way you can even add your own vocabulary cards. So it is an ideal means for a teacher or student to create vocabulary cards in view of his own classes. Another interesting feature is the French-Greek-French dictionary included in the program.

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