I have just been reading the amazing and intriguing doctoral dissertation by Francesco Felici, entitled "Now You’re Talking... Old Irish Towards a conversational approach to teaching Old Irish", and I want to share both the dissertation, and some related thoughts. The thesis itself is fascinating because it
In today's post I want to muse a little about the practice of using grammar-translation as a 'fall-back' position for when some type of communicative teaching 'isn't working'. I mean that in two different ways, and I think teasing out
As I wrote very briefly last week, I've moved thepatrologist over to a new site. In this post I want to talk about where we've come from, then very briefly about why the move, and then about where to find things that have gone missing, and
What does language exist for? Why learn languages? The answers to both of these questions are tied together: communication. Language exists fort he purpose of communication. That is, you and I as sentient beings share something, and we express and exchange meaning through the means of language. So the why
This is The Patrologist, the new but old site by Seumas Macdonald. I have a bit of tidying to do and making things more functional, but you can look forward to posts on language acquisition, ancient Greek and Latin, classics and patristics, and similar related topics. In the meantime you
Even as I wrote my last post, I considered complicating the metaphor I borrowed from Keeline: If you are working in a factory, you would be foolish not to use a forklift to lift things. If you are working out in a gym, you would be foolish to use a
(This was originally posted to my substack. But I think it's such an important piece, and it crosses the divide between my two blogging spaces, that I am reposting it here) The university sector is in crisis, humanities are under threat, AI is killing our ability to think,
Next in my series of things to share and tell you I'm excited about, Kevilex. (Just to be clear, this post is in no way sponsored by Kevilex. I just appreciate it so much I decided to tell you about it all). So excited, I made a whole
In this post, and a few more to follow, I want to share a few Greek-related things that I think are worthy of wider dissemination. The first in this little series, then, is the site Graecitas.com, run by Henry Quillen, and I want to highlight the blog in
Life continues on at SeumasU. Lately I have been crunching some numbers and collating my records. This term will mark 300 classes offered at SeumasU. We have taught our core intro Greek class, 101, 28 times now. Overall, more than 3000 hours of teaching Greek and Latin as living languages
(This post inspired by a conversation I was in.) There are lots of challenges, difficulties, and tensions in trying to adapt/change/alter/move a sequence of langauge teaching over to a more communicative approach. This is especially true in institutional settings, and probably moreso in seminaries than in colleges
Probably one of the best things I've ever done for my language learning has been time spent listening to podcasts. The year was 2018 (I know, a long time ago). We were preparing for our first ever Australian Rusticatio (first and penultimate), and I was starting to get