David Carruth wrote:Randall,
In the above response, you mention that memorizing principle parts list is not the way to go. You suggest using your morphology would be a better plan. How can one get enough repetitions to make the irregulars easily produced in speech and recognized in reading through looking up items? It seems that looking up words constantly would not give enough exposure at a decent pace.
Is to way to get a massive number of comprehensible inputs (via reading or audio) so that these irregular parts become natural?
Thanks,
David
Dr. Buth makes his usual excellent and cogent observations, but there is also nothing wrong with memorizing the principal parts of a verb. English teachers force children to do so with irregular verbs in English, so what's wrong with doing it in Greek? While we don't know if the ancients memorized principal parts in quite the same way we do, educated folks κnew that ἤνενκα went with φέρω and that ἔρχομαι and ἦλθον were associated, so they did come up with some method of conceptualizing the relationship. We do have direct evidence that little Greeks and Romans also memorized paradigms in much the same way that the traditional approach today does...