Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0453: New Testament Greek: Some grammar hacks with mnemonics

Episode Date: December 2, 2015

Irena is working on learning New Testament Greek and is struggling to learn the verb endings. I present some mnemonic ideas for making the project easier and more straightforward. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 453. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Irina submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Irina says, Hi, I'm studying New Testament Greek, and there are a lot of grammar endings to learn. Any mnemonic advice would be very much appreciated. So, Irina, I've dealt with learning grammar endings a lot, particularly when learning Spanish, but basically what I would recommend that you do

is that you group things with similar endings together and then that makes it easier for you. Now, how do you group those things together in your mind? Well, you want to treat your mind the way that it wants to be treated, meaning that you want to learn things the way that your mind likes to remember. So let's take nouns, for example. If you have nouns with different declensions, and you want to start with the first declension nouns, although eventually you'll have to learn second declension nouns and third declension nouns, what I would recommend doing is take just one noun and learn all of its endings, all of its possible declensions, and then to group that with the other first declension nouns so that

you remember that they're declended the same way, you don't just keep it in a list. You actually put it in a physical place in your imagination. Let's say you hang this noun on your Christmas tree. So the first declension noun that I'm thinking of here is scripture, the Greek word for scripture. So imagine hanging scripture on your Christmas tree. And then every time you learn another first declension noun, such as prophet or truth, you hang something like a prophet or something that represents truth on your Christmas tree as well. Then when you encounter this Greek word, this Greek noun, you'll remember it along with the first declension noun for scripture, and you'll remember that the

endings are used the same way. You treat them the same way. Now you're going to do the same thing for verbs as well. So you'll learn the most common endings for just one verb of a particular category of conjugation, and you'll imagine it in a particular place. Imagine that verb in a particular place. And then when you learn any other verbs, imagine them in that place if they're conjugated the same way, or in another place for a different category of conjugation. Now that's how you group them together so that you can remember which ones are conjugated which way and associate them with one that you've associated with that general declension or conjugation. To learn the endings themselves, it's

going to take a fairly complex mnemonic approach, but you can look at some examples for free at masterofmemory.com slash Spanish, where we give lots of examples of how to create mnemonics for verb endings in our Spanish course. Now, eventually, we're actually also going to come out with some New Testament Greek resources to cover all of this, so you don't necessarily have to create your mnemonics for yourself, although I can't give you a particular timeline for this at this point. Now, everyone, please check out masterofmemory.com slash Mandarin if you're interested in language learning and if you want to see what we have going on with our Mandarin course. Even if you're not interested in language learning, it's a great way to see

what we're doing at Master of Memory right now. What do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.