"You can always cheat. Language learning is one of the few places where cheating is usually just another form of winning."

In a recent thread on /lit/, a user writes:

I'm in the very early stages of learning ancient Greek, but I'm struggling with memorizing the case-endings. I feel like brute-forcing them is the most efficient way to learn them, but if anyone has some suggestions, please enlighten me.

Another user responds with the following advice:

Post 1

Brute forcing definitely works over time. In my Greek exams I would take out a massive piece of blank parchment and write out one or two full paradigms purely from muscle memory. That isn't a testament to my memory either, it's just how embedded they had become by then. But there were still things I struggled with too. I had certain "routes" I would take through the paradigm to eliminate ambiguities (easier to remember what form X looks like if you've already done forms F and T which are the ones you confuse with it most often and which "blur" your memory when trying to think). Rote memory really works. Eventually you just "feel" the structure of the table and you can fill it out by process of elimination even if you don't perfectly remember everything in 0.1s flat. But the more you do it, the more stuff will pass from "remember it with a second of effort" to "remember it because I just remember it." This happens through reading as well, but it's a nice boost to have the rote memory exercises on your side, and vice versa - you will eventually "feel" most of the obvious conjugations just from reading them so often.

Try using tricks like, obviously, remembering the signposts for very obvious conjugations (imperfect, aorist, perfect). But another key trick is to dwell on the thing I just said in the last paragraph: habitual use will make more and more of the conjugations come by feeling rather than a cognitive effort. Remember you're not going to be digesting a textbook forever. Soon enough you will be reading and translating, and much of what you currently find slipping from your mind will be ingrained in it. This will make the actual difficult or weird stuff that much easier to remember, because you will be expending the same amount of cognitive energy, but focusing it on fewer and more isolated things.

Trust in that process and in yourself. There's nothing magical about Greek. You WILL learn it if you just keep going. Imagine watching a TV show three or four times, then ten times. You'd start anticipating things you didn't even know you remembered, things you don't remember remembering. You could be an inattentive shitty passive viewer and you'd still be absorbing a thousand subtleties from the sheer repetition. That's happening in the background every time you feel like you're struggling.

Another trick is to remember that not all the conjugations and constructions are equal. You will mostly be encountering easy "bread and butter" ones, for the same reason the future perfect exists in English too but is super rare. When you do encounter hard ones, they'll stand out AS hard, and you'll be able to open your grammar and check them. That's normal. Don't get it in your head that you're "learning Greek" to be like a Greek-processing machine who recognises every form and decodes every page. Hate to break it to you but that's never going to happen. It happens even when you're a champion who has been reading Greek for years.

Post 2

Just finishing off this post. Above all remember the last bit, you aren't reading to have perfect memory of the textbook. Look at it this way: right now you are mostly digesting and remembering grammar and morphology facts. At some point, you'd like to be able to pick up a book and just read it. That's the simplest way to look at what "learning a language" is. But it's also too simplistic. The reality is there is a vast middle period between those two extremes, a hybrid period where you will have both a text you're working with and the textbook or grammar open. You will always be consulting dictionaries, glosses, grammars. What happens over time is not that you pass from phase 1 (assimilating and reviewing facts about language) to phase 2 (reading the language), but that you do less and less of 1 and more and more of 2, never really reaching the abolition of 1 altogether.

Not realising this was my big mistake when learning Latin and Greek. I stayed with the textbook and grammar way too long out of autistic devotion to being perfect before I was allowed to leave the shallows and really swim. But there's nothing to be lost and lots to be gained by just wading out and failing.

You could literally learn to read Greek reasonably well by half-learning morphology and just winging it with real texts, returning to the grammar as necessary. It'd be slower and (for most people, but maybe not for some dispositions) more tedious, but this has always been a valid and venerable way of learning. What you're doing by putting effort into memorising morphology is a modification of this strategy designed to make it easier and faster in the long run, not fundamentally a different strategy. Don't reify the textbook or deify the morphology tables. You can always cheat. Language learning is one of the few places where cheating is usually just another form of winning. Just saying all this because this is the advice I wish I had gotten.

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