Formosus Graecus

FORMOSUS GRAECUS helps you learn Ancient Greek forms and words quickly and thoroughly, so that you can concentrate on the contents of the text – and of course pass the Greek exam.

To understand Greek texts it is indispensable to know the Greek forms. Therefore, mastery of Greek morphology is the main focus/aim of this program: FORMOSUS GRAECUS can produce every form of every word in its integrated lexicon (with ca. 5500 items). It presents forms of every level of difficulty, selected at random, to the user for identification or translation into Greek. The user chooses which words or forms he wants to practice by selecting a preinstalled list of vocabulary or by creating his own.

The user identifies the presented forms by clicking the coloured buttons. In addition the meaning of the words has to be entered into a space at the bottom, so that a separate learning of words – immutable words are incorporated! – is not necessary. There are several ways in which the program can help the user: from indicating the buttons, which were wrong, to describing the morphological constituents of a word, to the direct presentation of the solution, so that helpless guessing is avoided. Ambiguity of the forms and words has also been taken into account.

Higher understanding of a Greek text can only be achieved by the user, if he has to compose forms himself: FORMOSUS GRAECUS  checks the given solution and marks the correct parts of the form in green. Here the different above named ways in which the user can receive help from the program are especially important. If the user doesn't find the correct solution, the form is saved to the list of mistakes, which can be practiced separately later.

An extension is the composing of chains of forms: It requires much concentration especially if the order of the forms is random. You can practice whole paradigms or groups of forms and words. A special selection is possible to practice principal forms. 

The variety of Greek forms often requires dividing a given form into its morphological parts to identify the base form of a word. For this FORMOSUS GRAECUS has a special section for analyzing forms. Here the word is analyzed (below). In the upper part you can compose a form which the program can then verify.

 

Learning words will not be so important, if the meaning of the words is included in the practice of the forms as described above. Nonetheless FORMOSUS GRAECUS has a section for learning especially the meanings of the words, too.

FORMOSUS GRAECUS  lets the user learn words in multiple steps, naturally always in both directions: it lets you
1. learn  the words by displaying the meanings, when you hover with the mouse over the words.
2. check your progress by clicking the words, where you are not sure, whether you have remembered them correctly
3.  be quizzed in the learnt words (with principal forms too, by writing them down yourself or listening to them beforehand as well).



4. Print lists of words or learning cards.
5. Play a game of Memory for recreation named “Mnemonix”.

TESTING FORMS
Teachers can create a batch of 10 forms for building or identifying and print it in different sizes (up to 8 tests on 1 sheet): The daily practice for your students with very little expenditure of time and labor!

PARADIGMS
FORMOSUS GRAECUS contains tables of all Greek forms to look up and compare.

LEXICON
You can use FORMOSUS GRAECUS - within the limits of its lexicon - as a normal dictionary. Moreover you can search for strings within a word.

ANCIENT GREEK FONT
FORMOSUS GRAECUS requires Unicode compatibility for polytonic Greek. Older versions contain an own Ancient Greek Textfont. There is an help panel for writing Greek on each page where it is required.

"Sounds great." (First reaction of an English speaking person in response to a short description of FORMOSUS GRAECUS).

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 Macintosh

Mac OS X ab 10.7.5 (incl. macOS Monterey and Ventura)

 Windows

Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, WIndows 10, Windows 11