I'd never thought of it that way. Speaking as someone who took years of Russian, I'm happy for you having come up with a way to never have to conjugate verbs, only read them. Brilliant.The nice thing about learning a "dead" language is that you don't really have to be able to compose or speak in it, which makes things a lot easier. As long as I can recognize the part of speech when I see it, I'm good to go; I don't necessarily have to be able to pull a given grammatical form out of thin air. I can learn at my own pace and in my own way.
Haha, especially 'cause Greek is much harder than Russian! I can't actually take credit for the idea. When I took Ancient Greek in college, my first year professor was all about learning the paradigms, which in a lot of ways was good for an intro class. When I go to my second year (when we were doing for real readings), that professor didn't teach us forms really, just gave us clues; things like "if you see a syllable repeated followed by a kappa, that's probably a perfect tense." The book I'm using now seems to take a similar approach, and again, it really makes way more sense in this context. It's also more like how we actually learn languages naturally.