Description

The Greek Elements Flashcards are a computer based flashcard system, the vocabulary being taken from the book THE GREEK ELEMENTS (available in print; please see our Catalog). The following is a brief description of this book:

“An Analysis of the Vocabulary of the Greek Scriptures into the Elements of which the Words are composed, and a Grouping of the Words under the Elements each contains, followed by the nearest English Equivalents, as used in The Concordant Version.”

The Elements, then, are the foundational components of the Greek language as used in the Scriptures from which all the more complex words are formed. Bear in mind that these basic components are abstracted into higher-order word concepts, and are not to be memorized as if they were the literal (sub-) meanings of fully constructed words, per se (granted, some Elements are complete words in themselves; this is so most often in the case of proper nouns). A study of these elements will, however, lead one to a much deeper appreciation of, and insight into, the Greek language, and thus, also, into the Scriptures themselves.

Download, Installation, and Use

1. In order to use the flashcard file you must download and install the MemoryLifter program from the MemoryLifter website:

   MemoryLifter

2. The MemoryLifter program uses a “dictionary” file that contains all the flashcards. There are a number of dictionaries available from the MemoryLifter website (as well as any that may have been installed with the program package itself), however the Greek Elements dictionary “GreekElements.odf” must be downloaded from here:

   Greek Elements Flashcards (Version 0.91)

   and put anywhere that is convenient on your hardrive, although it may be easiest to place it in the MLDictionaries folder that will be in the MyDocuments folder after installing MemoryLifter. Double clicking the file will start the program, or the program itself can be started from the Windows Start menu under the LearnLift group, and then use menu: File -> Open and then browse to the “GreekElements.odf” file.

3. Although the “GreekElements.odf” flashcard file is usable as is (which uses the Symbol font by default), we recommend using the Koine font which duplicates the Uncial font as seen in the original Concordant Publishing book “The Greek Elements”. To use this font, download it from here:

   Koine TTF Font

and install it into the fonts available to MS Windows by going to Windows Control Panel and double click Fonts, then select File -> Install New Font and browse to the folder that contains the font file that you downloaded, and select it in the List of Fonts pane and click OK. Then in the MemoryLifter program go to the menu Tools -> Dictionary Options -> General and click the font button directly to the right of “Greek Word Element” (looks like two letter A's) and select the Koine font.

4. The program uses a learning algorithm to emphasize those words that you have the most trouble with. Each correct word “graduates” to a higher box and is reviewed less often as you progress. If you would like to start over you can select Learn -> Restart, and all the boxes will be cleared with all cards back in the first box.

5. Be sure to try using the hotkeys: numbers 1, 2, and 3 to select answers, and Enter to effectively click the Submit and Next keys. It will make things move much faster as you pick up speed.

6. If you want to make corrections or changes to the word list, or just see the entire list of words go to menu Cards -> Maintain and make sure "Show - all cards" is selected. If there are blatant errors in the word list please pass along any bug reports to: email@concordant.org and these will be forwarded to the database maintainer. The current version of the database itself can be checked by going to menu Tools -> Dictionary options -> Advanced in the Info text area.
   
   

Limitations

1. Because there are potentially more than one spelling of a Greek Element for a given English Equivalent, it is not technically possible to switch the Tools -> Learning Options -> Learning Mode option to English -> Greek, or Mixed. You can do it if you want to, but you will sometimes get two or more Greek answers to choose from, all of which are correct, but the program is looking for one in particular, and you will get wrong answers counted even if you might happen to be correct. In addition to this is a bug in that the program assumes that the font in the right hand box is necessarily English, which it would not be, and will display English transliterated messages, which look fairly silly.
   
   

Bugs

The MemoryLifter program was not written by Concordant Publishing and therefore we are not able to implement fixes for bugs in the program. Here are some of the bugs that we are aware of, as well as any workarounds that may help while waiting for the MemoryLifter programmers to make updates:

1. Sometimes the English Equivalent window does not display all 3 of the multiple choices, although they are there out of view of the window. The best we can suggest is that you try resizing the window, or even click the Submit and Next buttons a few times. Also be aware that there is a second resizing border directly below the main flashcard pane and above the recent wrong answer row at the bottom; you can try resizing that as well. Once the program clears it's head, things seem to go pretty smooth with regards to this problem.

2. The wrong answer cards at the bottom do not display the current Greek font correctly. There is nothing that can be done unfortunately.

3. Make sure that you do not make the GreekElements.odf file Read-Only. If you start the program with the file this way, you will be caught in an infinite loop of trying to shutdown, and having the program abort the shutdown, etc. One way to solve this problem is to start Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer) and find the GreekElements.odf file. Right-click the file and select Properties. Find the Read-Only box and uncheck it (If it is already unchecked, then either this is not the file you think it is, or you are experiencing some other problem. Another way out of this is to use the Microsoft Windows Task Manager to kill the Mlifter.exe process, although this is not a graceful way of handling it, and killing a process always runs the risk of unpredictable damage (Win2K and XP are much better at handling process termination than Win95/98/ME).

4. If you navigate via menu: Learn -> Restart the program will clear out all your “boxes” but you will need to reselect which chapters to learn. The program will ask you for this, however if you skipped past it select Learn -> Specify Chapters to Learn and use the second double green arrow to Select All the chapters.