Greek Alphabet Cards (labs.randomquark.com)
107 points by ricochet11 16 hours ago
nayuki 8 hours ago
While bored in high school math class around the year 2005, I forced myself to learn the Greek alphabet. That very much came in handy in university, as Greek letters are frequently used for variables in computer science, mathematics, and physics.
jimkleiber 3 hours ago
Also plastered on frat and sorority houses all over town :-) (at least at many universities in the US)
mwexler 13 hours ago
Very handy. My math education would have gone much better if my notes weren't full of "lambda is the half stickman; sigma is upside down Q or broken E" and other really silly things
ventana 9 hours ago
As native speakers of a language that uses Cyrillic, it was a little easier for my peers and me to learn Greek letters for the math classes, since most of them come for free to people who know both Latin and Cyrillic.
But when the probability theory class started, everyone found themselves in one of two groups: those who could reliably draw "ξ", or those who instead drew some random snaky thing which probably does not even have a proper Unicode representation. I spent half an hour finally memorizing how the damn thing is actually written to move myself from the latter group to the former.
gobdovan 12 hours ago
Yeah, they should mark the Greek alphabet as a mandatory prerequisite for college math. It had an unreasonable effect on how quickly I was processing notation-heavy math after learning some Greek for going on a trip over there.
nephihaha 11 hours ago
As I say above, the issue is that modern Greek pronounces some letters very differently. We use the classical pronunciation in maths etc.
gschizas 5 hours ago
trvz 8 hours ago
ARandomerDude 12 hours ago
Get a decent Greek grammar book and go through the first couple chapters, even if you don’t plan to complete the book. After completing the exercises you’ll be amazed by how quickly the Greek alphabet stuck. Repeat every 10 years if necessary.
pjmlp 12 hours ago
As Portuguese that was of great help, given the amount of words with Greek roots, understanding the alphabet automatically made me available several words that I already knew.
Naturally had to skill up on everything else.
nephihaha 11 hours ago
The problem is that the ancient and modern Greek alphabets are slightly different. The ancient pronunciations map more easily on to our alphabet. I find the modern ones less intuitive e.g. beta being a V sound. There is an example below, where someone writes Bravo in modern Greek, and uses "mu beta" for the "b" sound and "beta" for the "v" sound.
ventana 34 minutes ago
As a fun fact, both Cyrillic letters Б б sounding "b" and В в sounding "v" were historically derived from Greek Β β.
wvbdmp 11 hours ago
B/V shifts or mergers are very common, notably in many Spanish variants they will, for example, write “vaca”, betraying the latin root “vacca”, but very clearly say “baca”. Coming from a language that clearly differentates between these sounds, it’s surprising how close they are.
ARandomerDude 11 hours ago
For ancient Greek, two great books are:
Greek: an Intensive Course by Hansen and Quinn.
Basics of Biblical Greek by William Mounce
Both are standard texts with solutions easily available online.
gschizas 5 hours ago
ομφαλός (belly button) is quite weird for ο (omikron), but I can't think of something better!
Just listing the letters below and my rating for each letter, maybe someone has a better idea for some of them:
α - αχλάδι (pear) 5/5
β - βάρκα (boat) 5/5
γ - γίδα (goat) 4/5
δ - δεινόσαυρος (dinosaur) 4/5
ε - έντομο (insect, bug) 4/5
ζ - ζώνη (belt) 3/5
η - ηλιοτρόπιο (sunflower) 3/5
θ - θρόνος (throne) 4/5
ι - ιππόκαμπος (seahorse) 3/5
κ - κάκτος (cactus) 2/5
λ - λιοντάρι (lion) 4/5
μ - μάσκα (mask) 4/5
ν - νυχτερίδα (bat) 4/5
ξ - ξύλο (wood, stick of wood) 2/5
ο - ομφαλός (belly button) 1/5
π - πόρτα (door) 4/5
ρ - ρακέτα (racket) 4/5
σ - σαλιγκάρι (snail) 5/5
τ - τραπέζι (table) 5/5
υ - υποβρύχιο (submarine) 4/5
φ - φίδι (snake) 5/5
χ - χιόνι (snow) 2/5
ψ - ψάρεμα (fishing) 3/5
ω - ωκεανός (ocean) 5/5
I'm basing my rating on how common a word is, and how much the shape resembles the drawing and vice versa.
jaharios 4 hours ago
For χ - χελιδόνι (swallow) with X tail-wings is the best
jnmandal 13 hours ago
Μπράβο ρε. Πόσο όμορφο
Avijit_Thawani 13 hours ago
Fascinating! I assume Mandarin is one of the other two languages your kids are learning, in which case you may be interested or have already seen Chineasy app and book, for a similar experience with Hanzi.
NooneAtAll3 12 hours ago
I wish cards like these didn't stop at ONE letter
a lot of reading skill is in connecting one letter to the next, syllable-grouped
teaching should incorporate that
FarmerPotato 3 hours ago
There was a hilarious illustrated book "Greek to Me". It is a thorough (English) introduction to koine Greek, mainly Bible as well as classical from Herodotus, Arrian, et al.
It uses the silly-picture mnemonic approach. For instance, the verb εγειρω features a fellow raising up a suction-cup arrow with an egg stuck in it.
Present-indicative conjugations are in a picture of an omelet oozing in an oasis:
-ω -ομεν
-εις -ετε
-ει -ουσιν
jonathanlydall 10 hours ago
Very cool. With English there is Letterland which seems quite similar at a glance.
EstanislaoStan 13 hours ago
I read this whole article like you were going to teach them Ancient Greek, but now I'm guessing modern is more likely?
Anyway, some of my strongest language class memories from college are from translating parts of the Odyssey and New Testament.
stavros 11 hours ago
Yeah these cards have modern Greek words on them.
romeinaday 12 hours ago
no download or buy link?
iandanforth 12 hours ago
I have similar projects in mind. How were these printed?
BigTTYGothGF 9 hours ago
I never understood what was supposed to be so hard about Greek letters.
FarmerPotato 3 hours ago
Kids aren't born knowing the Roman alphabet either. These cards are for four-year olds!
psychoslave 8 hours ago
Nothing special, probably not even the hardest out there to learn. But that's still requiring some effort, just like learning any alphabet actually. Greek somehow kept prestigious place in academia, so it's just more likely going to show that friction in the face of those who are there to learn completely unrelated matter for which using different alphabet is superfluous.
That just reminded me I have a teach yourself devanagari by practicing book waiting for me.
russum 11 hours ago
Are there good sets out there for other languages: English, German, etc?
unkeen 11 hours ago
This is about memorizing foreign letters.
BobAliceInATree 10 hours ago
No it's not. It's about teaching letter forms to kids.
unkeen 10 hours ago
vazma 11 hours ago
Very nice, I can borrow the idea to teach also my kids :)
metaphor 7 hours ago
During undergrad years, IFC fraternity pledges had to memorize the Greek alphabet for obvious reasons. This is how the capital letters were taught amongst bros.
A BRA
EZ HO
I KAM
NEON
PETY
OXY Oepilys 13 hours ago
> However, I haven’t found any such cards for Greek characters, so I think mine are the first in Greek.
Huh? A simple web search shows many, many, many results.
EstanislaoStan 13 hours ago
I tried searching and even had Claude search in modern Greek and didn't find specifically cards with objects shaped like the letters.
Can you share what you found?
tokai 12 hours ago
Search for Greek Flashcards.