Every beginning cuneiform student sets out on the seemingly impossible task of learning the hundreds of signs that make up the syllabaries. There are many different ways in which people try to do this but lately I came across an interview that might be of help. In the newsletter, “Damqatum,” Father Marcel Sigrist, who has done more than anyone else in the last quarter century to further the study of Neo-Sumerian, describes how he learned the signs:
Many people, when they start Assyriology, have a great problem with the signs. And to recognize the signs, to learn the signs, you have people who have a lot of little flashcards with the signs. I must say I had really very few problems to memorize the signs, and even to recognize the various shapes. Nothing is printed, but it is handwritten, it changes from one tablet to the other. The way to learn the signs was to put the signs as they are classified on one sheet of paper, and then to draw the sign and write the basic phonetic. So when you do this, and then you take a book -The Letters of Mari, which are very easy to read-you compare all the time the transliteration of the tablet with your chart. And when you have seen twenty times the same sign in a day, you know it. So there are easy ways to learn the signs.
This is pretty close to the way that I learned the signs as well. However, I did start with flashcards to give myself a little foothold while reading.
Other resources you could try include a sign workbook by Daniel Snell:
Lastly, the Knowledge and Power website has a section that helps you learn 100 signs.
Then there’s the method of a certain prof at a certain grad school who’s method is: here’s the unpublished text, go through Labat until you find the sign, then move on to the next one. After 10 hours on 10 lines of text, the grad student begins to learn the signs.
I’ve been auditing an intro Sumerian class in which we use the Konrad Volk reader. It’s been a challenge, as tho the proff’s mostly interested in our learning the inscription forms, but we really need to learn the Neo-Assyrian forms, too, in order to use a sign list.
The reader’s great, in that we learn a lot simply by repeat exposure. But I’ve been supplementing that by using a method derived from that I used for starting Chinese: Richard W. Heisig’s method in the *Remembering the Kanji* & Hanzi series. Most complex Neo-Assyrian signs can be broken down into multiple simpler signs. With each reading, I take all new signs, break them down into simpler signs, & create mnemonic stories for the combination. From there, it’s generally not too difficult to associate the older versions of the sign.
I then use a spaced repetition system of flashcards.
As I learn a sign, I look it up in the CDP so that I get more exposure to the ways it can look.
This seems pretty time-consuming, but it’s not really that bad, & it’s a breeze compared to Chinese. Given that Volk only lists 257 signs that he uses in his reader, there’s not *that* much to do. The more signs one knows, the easier it is to learn new signs.
Downsides: 1) I’m learning only one reading at a time, but I don’t find it hard to associate new readings as I encounter them. 2) SRS requires some kind of digital device. 3) The connexions are based on my whim, rather than sign history. I’d like to be working from Labat’s sign list or some equivalent I don’t know of. I’d love to go from pictograph to cuneiform sign. Unfortunately, I don’t have easy or regular access, & can’t afford a copy of my own.
This system may or may not work for others. I’m not sure how my classmates are learning the signs.