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 going on teaching communicative languages online as I finished my PhD. I realised that to improve my ability to teach through communicative methods, I also needed to work on it myself, and was taking some tutoring with some Latin speakers online.

And, frankly, it was the Golden Age of Latin Podcasting. There was Sermones Raedarii by the wonderful Alexander Veronensis, Quomodo Dicitur by “tres amici”, and Satura Lanx by Irene Regini. (All of these are still worth listening to, there’s hours of high quality Latin here)

Let me talk about these two things in relation to each other. I don’t think there’s anything quite as good as full-time immersion in an environment where comprehensible input is being delivered to you. That’s what a Rusticatio or similar is. (I think the ‘CI’ disclaimer there is important because I don’t believe just being immersed is necessarily that useful, the old ‘drop you in a foreign country’ kind of thing.)

That, however, is simply not available to most of us most of the time. Which is a real downer, I know. There’s nothing I’d like more than to offer some kind of Ancient Greek immersion camp. However, that’s costly, both in terms of having a location, having people, accommodation, food, and putting people all in the same place. I know such things are happening, in the States and Europe, but not so useful for me in far-flung Australia-land.

Anyway, Rusticatio was brilliant, because it was days and days of spoken Latin. But it was listening to well-structured podcasts that proved a real tipping point for my own ability to speak Latin. While driving, walking, or working out I had plenty of listening material that would fill my ears for 1/2 – 2hours a day. And that’s pretty good, frankly, if you can understand most of it. That’s CI. And it’s somewhat immersive. If you are listening, and not engaged in any task that is requiring, e.g., English, then you are just listening to understand people talking in the L2.

It’s the thing that most pushed me towards breaking through some barriers I had in speaking Latin, and pushed me towards competency. And the thing that got me first making my own podcast, was that I’d be driving along, listening to a Latin podcast, and I’d start talking in Latin, perhaps responding to what they were talking about, perhaps riffing off on my own. But as I did it with Latin, I started to do so in Greek, and came up with the idea of my original Greek podcast, ὁ διὰ νυκτὸς διάλογος.

Fast-forward to 2026. I’m in my final subject of a bachelor’s degree in Scottish Gaelic. I don’t live in a Gaelic-speaking context, I don’t regularly have conversational practice, and I don’t at all feel as fluent as probably somebody should be who is finishing off a degree in it. So, as I wrote here, I have been hard at work on improving my Gaelic, not least to pass the final oral exam. One of the things I have been doing extensively is… you guessed it, listening to podcasts. There are two excellent, learner-oriented podcasts for Gaelic, which are just perfect for me and I can easily get up to 3 hours in a day listening (I’d say 1hr is more average though).

And again I have noticed in myself that I am far more fluent now especially when speaking. I use the word fluent intentionally and deliberately here. I tend to avoid it, because in colloquial usage ‘fluent’ means “I have perfect native-like competency”, and that’s not really what fluency means, it means something more like ‘speed and easy of usage’. I can speak with a natural fluidity. And much of that has come from increasing the amount of immersive and extensive listening to Comprehensible Input I do, which again often leads me to pause the podcast and then start talking to myself.

There is, let me suggest to you, something about listening that is quite distinct from reading. And that’s why for most classical language enthusiasts, for students of Ancient Greek for example, listening needs to be more important than you generally make it or can make it. It gets into your brain in a different way, and then you start producing speech.

I didn’t originally intend this to be a ‘pointed’ post, i.e. I had no original agenda beyond sharing my experience and recommend you all do a lot more listening. There are only a handful of Ancient Greek podcasts out there, and I confess to you that I haven’t really listened to any of them. I plan to change that, for my own benefit, but I am also returning to the podcast space. Andrew Morehouse and I have no current plans to return to Ἑλληνιζόμεθα, but I am resuming episodes of ὁ διὰ νυκτὸς διάλογος talking by myself. Short episodes, scaled language, but hopefully useful to many of you. The first new episode is already up!

I know someone will raise the question of video materials. Aren’t videos better than podcasts because you have a visual component that makes the audio more intelligible? I think that is true, so far as it goes. Yes, you can make certain things immediately comprehensible by having visuals. So, for pure teaching, I think there’s a place for videos. However, my experience is that life doesn’t often afford me time to sit down and watch long-form videos, and the brain-rotting effects of the last 25 years of the digital economy make it hard for me to pay singular attention to a long video. The advantage of listening to a podcast is that there are often stretches of time (for myself, driving, working out, and walking) where I couldn’t do any study, reading, or watching, but I can listen and listen attentively while my body does other things. That is invaluable time spent in the language without distraction.

Lots of my current thoughts are emerging out of my studies in Gaelic this semester. Today I want to talk a little about how we conceptualise a ‘word’. And why it’s so problematic a concept but ineluctably so.

I think that a lot of us, when we are children in our teens, perhaps earlier, go through this little literacy revolution, where we begin to conceptualise ‘language’ in terms of the written word. Our idea of what is really the language becomes defined by orthography and the word on the page. You see this a bit in how pedantic people, children, become about how their name is spelled. It must be spelled exactly right, because that’s my name. You see it too when people start pronouncing words wrong, because that’s how it’s written, and the mis-alignment between written language and spoken language becomes really a source of annoyance. It’s mostly a phase, and most of us grow out of it, but the shift still occurs. Our platonic ideal of ‘the language’ becomes tightly bound to the written word.

One of the great things about English orthography, by the way, is that it’s not the IPA. Every now and again someone thinks we should have spelling reform in English, and it’s a terrible idea. See, English is pronounced all sorts of ways all over the world, and so the idea of a word, tied up in how it’s spelled, being pronounced differently, enables a beautiful commonality of communication despite the differences in the way we say things. This, too, is why keeping an orthography stable across time means that you and I can read things from 500 years ago and understand them, even though the way English was pronounced then would be fairly unrecognisable to us.

So, what we tend to end up with, for English, is a concept of the word that reifies its spelling, and accepts a certain range of pronunciation. That range has limits though. Let me give an example at the edge: Chinese logographic writing, where the pronunciation of a ‘word’ can be wildly different between different languages, say Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese, despite them using the same written ‘word’ to represent it. We would struggle to say that those are the same ‘word’ even though they have the same character.

Now, what happens when orthography gets a bit more loosey-goosey? Ah, welcome to Scottish Gaelic. Firstly, modern Scottish Gaelic as a language of writing doesn’t really go back that far, and really only develops strongly from the 18th century onwards. Early texts often have divergent ideas about how to represent sounds. Yes, there is a literary tradition stretching back into Old Irish, but that is not entirely determinative. Gaelic did undergo a spelling reform in 1981, revised again in 2005 and 2009, the “Gaelic Orthographic Convention” (GOC). Gaelic orthography has a number of interesting features, some that pull in different directions. On the one hand, one written form can represent a number of pronunciations, covering the dialect spectrum. That is similar to English that I spoke of above. In Gaelic it can be a little more extreme. I sometimes hear speakers pronounce words and have no idea what they’re saying until I already know what ‘word’ they’re pronouncing.

On the other hand, when you read pre-reform texts, you see that there is this wide range of how people realised what they were saying, which in a sense makes the spoken word the primary form, in a reversal of the idea of the written word above. That there’s a single spoken ideal of a ‘word’ – the word as said, and then a pluriform range of ways of writing that. That puts our ideas about what a word ‘is’ upside-down.

Which delivers us to the tension: if one written word can be pronounced in multiple ways and still be the same ‘word’, and one spoken word can be pronounced one way but written in multiple ways and still be the same ‘word’, and yet both can also be true, and one word can be pronounced multiple ways and then also written multiple ways, is it still one word? Or is it many words?

I’ll try to give a Greek example for a moment. Are γίγνεται, γίνεται and γείνεται all the same word? (Yes, I think they are). This is just spelling variation. But it’s spelling variation that also represents variation in pronunciation. If you’re an Atticist, you think γίγνεται is the archetypal form, and the others are aberrations. And if you conceive of the spoken word as primary, then what you have is not spelling variation per se, but variation in realisation of a single word. But that’s precisely where the boundaries get blurry.

Hopefully I’ve made your head hurt just a little. To make it hurt more, it helps to know that there is no real consensus among linguists about how to define a word anyway. It’s a tricky concept and across languages it gets complicated enough that no definition works for all languages.

Last year my excellent friend and even better Latin teacher, Gregory Stringer, taught a new course for Latin teachers teaching the new AP Latin curriculum, focused on Pliny’s Letters. Well, he’s back, and this time covering the other lot of Pliny’s letters. This is a great course if you’re teaching this material, but it would also be wonderful if you’re just interested in reading some Pliny, with an experienced and talented Latin teacher.

Course details are here.

Starts Feb 23rd!

I’ll link the video interview we did before the first course, in which we talk about the new AP, Pliny, and his co-authored book/teaching resources.

It’s that time of year! Things are winding down for the holiday season, classes are about to wrap up, and I’m looking ahead to 2026.

I’m always open to suggestions of what to run. I have a few ideas for later in the year already. Here is what I’ll be offering in my first term, starting in the last third of January:

Greek 101: The first of my four foundational units working through the textbook Athenaze, this course meets for 1.5hrs each week, and covers chapters 1-8.

Greek 227: Luke’s Gospel. In this course we’ll read extensively from Luke’s Gospel in Greek, with discussion and explanation of the text in Greek (and some English where required)

Greek 241b: Herodotus Book 7 (Continued): This course follows on from an earlier unit in Herodotus, but you’re welcome to join us as we read on. We’ll be starting around 10.θ.

Greek 273: Intro to Conversational Greek for post-beginners: I’m very pleased to offer this course again, which I haven’t run in some time. It’s designed for those with a fair amount of Greek, especially in a traditional mode. We’ll use a number of techniques including story-asking, TPRS, picture talk, movie talk, and so on, to get us talking in Greek. Perfect if you ‘know’ Greek but have never spoken it.

Latin 101: I’m also excited to start a new cohort of introductory Latin. This first class will work through Hans Ørberg’s Familia Romana (Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata) chapters 1-10

Latin 243: The Moralized Ovid: reading through the 14th collection of allegorical and Christianised takes on Ovid! A more advanced class conducted almost entirely in Latin.

I’ve been working away on writing course notes for λαλεῖτε, which is designed to be a course in “how would you learn to speak Ancient Greek, as if you were doing a course for a modern language and learning the basic language that a CEFR-A1 course might teach?”

It’s been a really good exercise for myself, and just this week I was going over talking about days and dates.

For days, it’s not so difficult. There’s both an ecclesiastical set of days of the week derived from Christian usage and what I would call the Classicising approach, which is also historically grounded, but it’s grounded in the use of planet names from the Roman days of the week, so again reflecting late antiquity usage. Neither of these represent a 5th BCE Athenian ideal because 5th BCE Athenians didn’t use a seven-day week:

Dates

But what about dates? If you’ve ever dived into this, you’ll know that Athenian calendars were complicated, and don’t easily align to our Gregorian calendars at all. Plus, there are other months in use in other places. So, again, the solution seems to me to go to late antiquity, where Hellenised versions of Roman names were used:

• Ἰανουάριος (Ianuarios) – January
• Φεβρουάριος (Phebrouarios) – February
• Μάρτιος (Martios) – March
• Ἀπρίλιος (Aprilios) – April
• Μάϊος (Maïos) – May
• Ἰούνιος (Iounios) – June
• Ἰούλιος (Ioulios) – July
• Αὔγουστος (Augoustos) – August
• Σεπτέμβριος (Septembrios) – September
• Ὀκτώβριος (Oktōbrios) – October
• Νοέμβριος (Noembrios) – November
• Δεκέμβριος (Dekembrios) – December

But how should you specify a date in a modern sense? That was my last piece of the puzzle. I think the answer is πόστος

πόστος, you say, what on earth is πόστος;

Indeed. Ancient Greek has no shortage of specific interrogative (question) words, and πόστος is the word to ask “what number in a sequence?” If you’re after an ordinal number as a response, πόστος seems the perfect solution

πόστη ἡ ἡμέρα ἐστίν;  Which date is it?

πόστῇ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τοῦ Ἰουλίου (μηνός) τὰ γενέθελιά σου;   Which day of July is your birthday?

Best Friend

When it comes to language learning, time is your friend. It’s there every step of the way, and you are going to be spending a lot of it to get anywhere. And so don’t sweat it. Enjoy the ride. It will take time, and that’s okay. Just keep spending time with the language and you will advance.

Worst Enemy

Time is also your worst enemy. The unmovable wall you will come up against is usually time. You don’t have enough of it, and you need it to progress your language. Life is busy, you have multiple demands, and you can only spend so much of your time on a language. The thing most holding you back is almost always time. And, if you happen to be learning more than one language, it gets worse! You have to divide your time between them.

Try to make peace with this. You can only control this so much. Make a commitment as to how much time you’ll spend, and keep that. Don’t feel bad for not doing more, and don’t let yourself spend less (unless emergencies arise!)

Resources

I’ve written before about how I think one of the best ways to keep yourself accountable is to count hours. I stand by that. Time is perhaps the main resource you are going to invest in a language. It’s not the only resources though. But, assuming you go and get some at-least-decent language learning materials, time is going to be the biggest determiner to your progress. What are good resources? Well, if you’ve read anything I’ve posted on this site in the last decade, you’ll know that I think you want communicative, comprehensible materials that are in the target language and understandable at your level. That’s really the ideal. But perhaps that’s not always possible. Whatever you do have, you can still make it work. Just focus on what part of the materials is in the language, and make it understandable one way or another.

Measure

So, you can measure your language learning just by minutes/hours. I think that’s a good way to do it. But another way to think about it is with a bit more refinement.

How many words in the target language are you being exposed to (per minute, if you like)?

I don’t think you should actually try to calculate this, but this helps tie together the question of resources and time. If you pick up a traditional grammar textbook and it’s 10 words of Latin to 200 words of English explanation, then the signal-to-noise ration is 1:20, and so then multiply by the time it takes you to work through each section, you can derive a kind of “words of Latin per minute of study”. Ideally we want this to be high.

So, what if you were just reading or listening to a stream of in-language communication? Let’s say you’re listening to native speaker Spanish at 140wpms, or reading German at 200wpm. That’s pretty good for an L2. Again, we need to consider two factors. Firstly, is there English (or other L1) ‘wrapping’. I.e. what if you listen to a learner podcast and it’s got lots of English explanation. This dilutes the signal-to-noise ratio for you. Secondly, how much are you comprehending.

See, it might sound good at first to listen to French radio, because you’ll get a stream of spoken French, but if you’re only understanding 5%, this isn’t much better than a traditional style textbook! And somewhat demoralising.

So, really, we can think in terms of this kind of equation:

Minutes spent learning x words per minute of target language x percentage of words understood.

That’s our rate of comprehensible input. Again, I’m not saying you should try to calculate this! It’s a theoretical equation to make clear how different choices affect our language learning. And why we are trying to make better choices.

As for resources, to the extent you are able you want to choose written, audio, or audio-visual inputs that are primarily in the target language, and that for your current ability have a high percentage of comprehensibility (95% ideally). But of course, if your language is ancient Greek or Latin, your options are not endless here. There’s more and more great content, but there’s never enough, and finding the right things at your level can be difficult. So, it may just be the case that you have to settle for ‘less ideal’ resources, and because the WPM of Target Language x Percentage Understood is lower than you’d like, you have to spend more time to make more of those words comprehensible, and so spend more time to get the same amount of input.

But, in the end, this is the game. This is how it’s played. Pick your best resources, set yourself up as well as possible, and then just keep at it, keep investing the time, and the language will come. Slowly, quickly, but over time you’ll improve.

I mostly write about classical languages here, Greek and Latin, but long time readers will know that I have been a long-time learner of Scottish Gaelic [1]

. I thought it might be informative if I wrote a little bit about what I’m currently doing for my Gaelic studies, as a window into thinking about breaking through from intermediate to ‘fluent’, and then making some connections to Latin and Greek studies.

The story so far

I began learning Gaelic many moons ago, with the venerable Teach Yourself Gaelic textbook by Boyd Robertson and Iain Taylor, with accompanying cassette tape. I stalled about chapter 6 or 7, as many did. Then followed short-courses in Sydney, other textbooks, online tutoring, courses with the Atlantic Gaelic Academy, an eventually Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. When I started at SMO, it was phone tutorials, which meant calling in via skype to a phone-chat! The pandemic forced them to move genuinely online, for which I was truly thankful, and their Cursa Inntrigidh seamlessly rolled into their degree program, and so here I am several years later putting the finish touches on a BA in Gaelic.

For all that, I have been ‘at’ my Gaelic for a long time. And I have reached a pretty decent ability for that – I have read a few books in Gaelic, can understand a lot of content, write and translate into Gaelic, but I also have some limitations. I don’t have the ‘bank’ of conversational experience that I really want or need, I struggle to understand some spoken Gaelic (either due to vocabulary, dialect, or just some people are hard to understand), can’t always express myself fluently on topics, and just haven’t ‘arrived’ at what most people think of as fluency.

Fluency and imposter syndrome

But this year might be crunch-time. My final subject is ‘Gaelic 3’, the core language subject in the third year of the degree, and whereas I can often hide behind strong written work, this feels like the class that could finally expose that I’m nowhere near as fluent as I appear to be. Or that could be imposter syndrome at work. Who knows! I do feel, though, that this is the year to make a final push and really break through in terms of all areas of my language learning. So, I’m putting in the hard yards to make this year count. What does that look like?

A strategy for increasing comprehensible input day by day

The amount of material for Gaelic has grown year on year, and so learners today are better served than in years gone by. That’s a real blessing for me over here in Australia! I’ve put together a plan to tackle all elements of the language and get myself up to speed. Here’s what it looks like:

Apps!

Anki: the classic Spaced Repetition flashcard system. I set up a new deck, and I add every unknown or not-well-known word, idiom, phrase, or sentence. I then make sure to do my daily review of everything due. The deck is growing.

Duolingo: I’m on record as not a big fan of duolingo, but I also think the Gaelic course there is the best version of a community-constructed course, and a high quality one. I finished the Gaelic tree a long time back, so I mostly just do revision. It’s great for reminding me of vocab, spelling, and a few odd things here and there.

Glossika: Is another spaced repetition learning system, with sentences and audio. The Gaelic course is (a) free due to being a minority language, (b) done by Moray Watson, an academic and author (and language course writer). It has a lot of idiomatic phrases, and things I wouldn’t guess at, say, or come across otherwise. I use this for mass listening practice.

Speed-running learning materials

I have more than a few Gaelic learning books and materials that I’ve accumulated. So one of my tricks is to ‘speed-run’ my way through things. That includes Progressive Gaelic (the textbook series by Moray Watson mentioned above), as well as working with other resources I have. Perhaps one of the best things that I’m using is the Speak Gaelic materials launched in 2021. Also probably one of  the best actual initiatives the government has thrown money at. It encompasses television episodes (available on YouTube), Podcasts, course notes, and a web interface with learning activities, and it attempts to align with the CEFR and covers A1 through to B2.

So, each day I keep a learning journal, and mark down what I’ve done, which is at least 1hr of listening and often 1hr of other work as well. I also supplement the specific learning materials with reading, listening, and watching Gaelic content, learner-directed or not. And then I’m also working on my writing skills as well.

For the classically minded

What lessons might we learn for Latin and Greek from this approach? It’s much harder to attempt to go ‘all-in’ like this for Latin or Greek, if only because you have far fewer resources to turn to, especially geared towards learners, and far less in the audio and visual realm. On the plus side, because there is less, you can “do it all” if you’re prepare to dedicate your time to it. Though I have my doubts about the so-called Roberts-Ranieri approach, if you want to buy every beginner textbook and use them all simultaneously, and then listen to all the ancient Greek audio you can get your hands on, this will be some kind of effective self-immersion. I can’t tell you how far this will get you, but it will get you somewhere. And I do keep encountering people, students who turn up to my classes, who have a wealth of Greek and a decent spoken ability. For Latin, I dare say, it’s easier – there’s more to read, far more to listen to, and some quality youtube content.

One thing that I would note is this – often when I hear spoken Gaelic I have trouble processing it because, as I said above, variations in dialect, speed of speech, accent, etc. I don’t find the same with Ancient Greek and Latin speakers. I think because (i) most of us aren’t that fluent, (ii) so we don’t speak very fast, elide everything, and roll thoughts of our tongues the way native speakers might, (iii) the content-creators of classical languages tend to be consciously making their speech understandable (thanks!), articulating words clearly, recording with good quality sound, and helping you as a listener. That makes a big difference.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this little reflection. Check back in with me around May to see if I’ve been discovered as an imposter, how my Gaelic has grown, and what I’ve learnt to apply to Greek, Latin, and beyond.

[1] So, people get very worked up about what you call these two languages, Gaelic and Irish. Americans, generally, seem to call Irish Gaelic ‘Gaelic’, and Scottish Gaelic ‘Scots Gaelic’ or similar. People in other places speaking English tend to call Scottish Gaelic ‘Gaelic’, and Irish Gaelic ‘Irish’. In Gaelic, we call the one Gàidhlig na h-Alba, and the other Gàidhlig na h-Èireann. Honestly, there are more important things to fight over.

χαίρετε πάντες!

I’m here today to let you know about new and upcoming courses that I’m offering in Q4 of 2025. There are a few different things going on, so this post will explain them as well as my course offerings. Most of the courses below (apart from Greek 102) are 8 weeks rather than my usual 10.

Introductory Greek?

If you’ve been around for a while you’ll know that I primarily teach an introductory sequence working through the Athenaze textbook. This term I am not offering a 101 beginner class. So, if you were planning to start with me this term, get in touch via the contact form below. I’ll be happy to talk through where you’re at and what I think you should do. I will offer a new 101 cohort in January of 2026.

I am offering a 102 course, if that’s the right level for you. That’s Athenaze Book 1, chapters 9-16.

Other Greek

There’s a whole four other Greek classes I am offering, so let’s talk about those:

Greek 111: Speak Ancient Greek! (A1) : This is a brand new course with materials I am currently writing. It’s designed to teach you to speak Ancient Greek, in a very conversational manner, as if it were a modern language, and work through topics and areas aimed at bringing you to a A1 level according to the CEFR.  It’s about one-half of an A1 course. You can take this class as a total beginner, but let me know if you don’t know the alphabet.

Update: I’m now offering a second block of this class (since the first one filled up!)

Greek 238: Greek Patristics: I enjoy reading Patristic texts, perhaps you do too. This class may continue on with Origen Contra Celsus, or we may do something else. I’ll be talking to students before term starts to decide what we’ll do. But it will be fun. And strange.

Greek 241: Herodotus Book 7: This is definitely a post-beginner class, where we’ll do some reading of Herodotus, and discuss and comment on it in both Greek and some English, depending on the participants. Book 7 has some great material!.

Latin!

I haven’t taught much Latin this year, and it’s been a while since I’ve offered introductory Latin. If you’d like to do some introductory Latin in 2026, let me know in the contact form below. What I am offering this term are two different medieval classes!

Latin 240: Bede: I’ve never read Bede in Latin, but I hear great things. We’ll tackle some selections from Historia Ecclesiastica.

Latin 242: Beeson’s Medieval Primer: Beeson produced a wonderful anthology, and this class will tackle some of the prose selections from it.

Living Greek?

I’m (sadly) not going to offer an in-person live class in Sydney this term/year. I don’t have an evening free that I can dedicate to it. If you are interested in live in-person offerings in Sydney, and want to chat to me about possibilities in 2026, also get in touch.

Other news

As I’ve said a few times, this year I’ve been trying to develop some video skills to produce more video content. You can see a little of this in terms of English-language videos on a few topics over on my youtube channel. I’ve started slowly but steadily recording and releasing καθ’ ἡμέραν videos as well, which are verse-by-verse treatments of New Testament texts. Lastly, I’ve been adding to the Teachable course materials slowly, developing and fleshing out the 103 course of video lectures.

The video work is also going on behind the scenes to develop a new and improved vision and version of LGPSI or something like that, to teach ancient Greek from scratch. More details on that when I have more concrete things to say and share.

Lastly, I am still doing some writing. Some of that is for the Speak Ancient Greek materials mentioned above (catchy name/title suggestions welcome!), developing Galilaiathen towards publication, and a second novella. All of which take more time than I have, but I’m at work here!

Thanks for reading to the end of this rambling update and course advertisements.

Two things occasion my reflection today. Firstly, the crisis now engulfing U Chicago, and its internal documents circulated, regarding cutting humanities, languages in particular, sending students off to other institutions, trying to get AI to teach languages. There’s a lot more to be said about that, and this isn’t the place for it nor am I the person. It does, however, reflect ongoing decline in languages, including or especially classical languages, in university and college contexts. In Australia, I could point to several institutions currently gutting their humanities departments, shutting down classical language lines due to lack of students, and the number of places where it will be possible to learn Ancient Greek in a class will soon be down to very few indeed.

Secondly, I was asked recently about some tutoring, and not being able to take this particular student on I had to go and do some due diligence about other providers I could send them to. Where can you send someone to get a decent education in Ancient Greek, particularly with good language pedagogy? The answer, again, is not many places.

My main point today is that the ‘not many places’ are almost all not-institutional. At best they are small institutions (Polis is probably the most formal and most accredited institutional type); otherwise they are generally institutional-adjacent/parallel/outwith. This is where good quality Ancient Greek pedagogy mostly resides – with a small handful (growing, though) of highly motivated and highly skilled speakers and practitioners of Greek, who have committed themselves to communicative methods, and are prepared to go all-in. Few of them reside in institutions of the traditional kind.

In the New Testament Greek ‘sphere’, this is probably exemplified by the two trends in continuing tension. On the one hand, you have the growth of things like Biblingo, and an ongoing minority interest in communicative approaches, on the other hand you have the ongoing decline of Greek studies at seminary level. Fewer programs require it, it’s mostly not taught well, and most graduates struggle to retain or use their Greek in pastoral office. I know of only two institutions utilising communicative practices in a seminary context in North America (please let me know of others!)

The simple fact is that I would struggle to tell anybody that the place they should go to learn Ancient Greek is an old-style institution like a college or university. Few of them are teaching Greek, fewer are teaching it well, and the amount of money students are putting up for that kind of education could better be spent elsewhere. As far as I can tell, most of the leading lights of communicative Greek competency and well-founded Second Language Acquisition pedagogical practices exist on the fringe, adjacent and adjunct to larger institutions if at all, forming alternative networks of education and communities of practice.

If you haven’t heard elsewhere, Gregory Stringer, an excellent and experienced Latin speaker and teacher, is running a course starting in September geared towards the new AP Latin course covering Pliny. He and I talk about the new curriculum, his new workbook, and the course in this video.

Places are limited, sign up today.

It’s probably everybody’s favourite question for me, and one of my least favourite, because I know how much people want this to progress, and I want it to progress, and it’s … slow-moving.

So in today’s post I want to tell you what’s happening with it at this very moment.

But firstly, let’s just acknowledge that there are just various constraints on my life, in terms of external obligations, family duties, the need to work for money to eat, and so on. My biggest constraint is simply that I do not have that much time to devote to writing LGPSI and its pay-off, in purely financial terms, is a long way off. I also don’t have a team, I don’t work for an institution that’s backing me or giving me time to work on this, there’s no ‘machine’ behind this, just me in a room with a computer and a big pile of books.

So, I am actively working on LGPSI at present, but that work right now is far more foundational than extending. The text at present sits at around 17 chapters, and part of me realises I could just ‘keep writing’, but I don’t find that satisfactory. As I’ve worked on this and other projects and teaching in general and observed various books and teachers, I’m aware that what I’ve produced so far isn’t what I want it to be from a pedagogical standpoint. That, in part, comes from piggy-backing of Lingua Latina per se illustrata so much in the beginning, but it is also a problem with trying to produce a direct method textbook.

A direct method textbook, or natural method, of the kind that Ørberg produced, isn’t actually the ‘gold standard’ according to our best contemporary Second Language Acquisition knowledge. I still think Ørberg’s LLPSI is the best possible product on the Latin market, because there’s simply nothing that anyone has produced that is even a close second. It’s a work of careful genius. And that’s partly why I still think there’s space for something like that for Greek. Athenaze is not that, it’s just the best we have. The Italian is better, yes. Logos isn’t all one dreams of. So, yes, there could and should be a Greek LGPSI.

And yet, in comparing Greek and Latin, you start to realise some of the problems that Greek presents. These include:

That pesky article. The fact that Greek has an article, and Latin doesn’t, and Greek’s article comes in so many different forms. Just means that right up front a student is wondering what on earth that is doing.

‘Basic’ words don’t follow ‘basic’ patterns. Ørberg can get away with, in chapters 1-4, using very basic words for everyday things, and keep them mostly to regular 1st and 2nd declension words across the 3 genders. Greek cannot. If I try to replicate chapter 1’s basic geography language, we’re left with ἡ νῆσος, ὁ ποταμός, ἡ πόλις (or some alternative word for a built-settlement), so we have one feminine 2nd declension, and a fairly irregular 3rd declension already in the mix. If we start with humans, we have παῖς, ἀνήρ, γυνή, πατήρ, μήτηρ, and so we’re really starting with a variety of 3rd declension nouns. So morphologically the student is trying to make sense of an array of endings that don’t readily gel.

Lack of cognates in European languages. One reason Ørberg does start the way he does is because you can really lean on some cross-language familiarity in drawing a map of Europe and the Mediterranean and talking about countries/provinces. And even though Ørberg doesn’t explicitly lean on cognates, I do think that underlying some of LLPSI’s accessibility is that Romance speakers and English speakers can all get into LLPSI with some level of familiarity. That ‘step up’ is not there for Greek, not to the same extent.

The alphabet. I don’t actually think this is a big, big obstacle, but learning a new writing script is a speed-bump for most learners that needs to be tackled. I have this mostly sorted, but it’s also complicated by the next issue.

Pronunciation Wars. Latin really only has two competing schemes for pronunciation: classical and ‘ecclesiastical’ (or its similar modes), and classical is mostly winning. Greek, does not. It has multiple competing schemes and arguably several of these options are good for learners depending on their interests and purposes. I do not think there is a one-size-fits-all solution for Ancient Greek pronunciation. Which matters because you can’t keep everybody happy all of the time.

So, what am I doing, again? Partly what I am doing is going back to some first principles. I’m working on trying to build a better foundation for those first stages where a text, with illustrations, will clearly allow a learner to understand and intuit what’s going on, without recourse to a 2nd language.

But I’m also asking these two sets of questions: what would video course materials look like that would teach a course towards Ancient Greek proficiency? Could they work in tandem with such a text to provide a comprehensive package? How would they relate to each other?

And, what happens if you think about the challenge of developing communicative competency, along the lines of CEFR or ACTFL standards? What does that look like for Ancient Greek, and what would it look like in a course?

I guess my third question or set of questions is, are these compatible aims and goals and projects, or am I trying to meld together too many things?

All this to say, I am at work, and thinking hard about solving some of these problems, and writing materials that might actually do what we all want them to do: provide a path towards genuine Ancient Greek proficiency through the medium of Ancient Greek.

Firstly, this term I have a class on Niels Klim’s Iter Subterraneum, a wonderful piece of speculative fiction, verging on sci-fi, from the 18th century. I have moved this class from Sunday evening to Tuesday, US time. So if the time/day was not suitable for you before, perhaps it will be now. The start date has been pushed back to Aug 5th so there’s time to sign-up.

Secondly, Greek 101 is starting a week late, so there’s also time to join that class if you are interested, now starting July 24th. Sign up here.

I’m pleased to announce here the launch of my book, Ὁ ἐπὶ Τροίᾱν Πόλεμος (the Trojan War).

The novella is a translation and adaptation of Bellum Troianum by Brian Gronewoller, it’s a 5000 word novella for Elementary-Mid readers. It’s a great little book, and I recommend it to you! Today I want to spend some time reflecting on the writing/translating process that lead to this volume, and what it has taught me for future work.

Origins

Brian and I spoke initially about these types of projects back in July 2023. We shared a common background in Patristics and in Latin teaching, and independently of all my work, Brian had been moving more and more into communicative practices, and the novella ‘movement’, and involved in writing and publishing his own works. I served as a reader for some of his Latin novellas (and I’m glad to say I’ve read a few of the other Greek novellas out there as well), and we got to discussing the need for Greek works too. But even at that meeting, we put this project on the table: it seemed like low-hanging fruit to take an already written Latin novella about the Trojan war and make it Greek. Perfect subject matter, pre-written materials, piece of cake!

Of course, anyone who has ever translated anything (which includes me) knows that it’s never so simple. Firstly there’s the many things that intrude upon my time and life, which have sabotaged several projects of mine in the last few years. Some are postponed more than others. Secondly, translation is an art in itself, and as I dove into translating this one, I soon realised curious features about the twin daughters Latin and Greek. There are words and phrases and expressions that are very straightforward in Latin, or common, or easily understood. And then I realise that (i) I actually have no idea how to say ‘simple thing X’ in Greek; or (ii) there’s no real corresponding Greek structure or phrase; sometimes (iii) I go digging and hunting and learn something new about Greek altogether.

How long did the book take to actually produce?

Not 2 years, really. I worked in fits and starts, and when I was in the zone, got quite a bit done very quickly. Confirming to myself that I can really do a lot of good Greek work in good time, provided everything else in my life stays put. Proofing, having readers look at it, compiling the index and checking that, were all valuable processes that took more time but have made the final product much better than it would have been.

Then there’s the headache of Greek fonts and macrons. There are very few books out there with macrons for long iota, upsilon, and alpha. I’m a big advocate for those, and so I include them in my own writing when I can, and for this book I made my best efforts to get them right, and right from the start. Getting them to print correctly on the page in a Greek font is another issue. Combining multiple diacritics, especially if you have three of them, stretches unicode to its limit and some unicode choices weren’t (in hindsight) the best. Mostly, though, it’s about a font being willing and able to render combinations with macrons correctly. That was a headache, mostly for Brian, but he persisted at my behest, and I am glad for it.

Who is the book for? 

The novella is rated as Elementary-Mid on the ERF scale. It uses a variety of tenses and structures as needed, it’s not ‘grammar-sheltered’ but vocab sheltered. This kind of data is available on the shop page, which is excellent. I think you could read this at all sorts of levels, since every word is glossed in context, and collocations or phrases are also glossed appropriately. Grammar isn’t explained, but that’s the point. You should be able to read it with a range of Greek ability, and I’d love to hear feedback from people reading it and their experiences.

How to use it?

Ancient Greek learners, like all language learners, need comprehensible input, and extensive reading is a great way to get that. But we need a lot more reading material suitable for learners at all stages. This is one, small drop of reading material, but hopefully one of many to come. Read it like a story, enjoy it; read it with friends; do Q&A about it. Pull it apart. Write fan-fiction off the side of Homer. Read it to your kids while they sleep.

What’s next?

I have at least one new novella in mind, as well as work on Galilaiathen and LGPSI, these will be my writing foci for the next few months.

Where to buy?

Yes, correct question!

If you’re in the United States, please buy direct from the publisher. It’s better for them, better for me, and better for the world.

If you’re not in the USA, you can purchase through localised amazon. e.g. the australian site here.

E-book versions are available.

My next term of classes is due to start in late July, so it’s time I tell you about them!

Firstly, the four-sequence introductory courses in Greek:

Greek 101 (Athenaze 1-8)

Greek 102 (Athenaze 9-16)

Greek 103 (Athenaze 17-24)

Greek 104 (Athenaze 25-30)

In more advanced courses, this term I am running

Latin 239: Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum: an 18th century satirical piece of speculative fiction.

Greek 237: Origen, Contra Celsum Book 7  : Origen, enough said!

In non-teaching news, I am stopping teaching on my Wednesdays so I can devote the whole working day to writing LGPSI material and developing video resources. I hope to update you further on that soon, as well as provide some early-access options.

Just a quick post today to say that I’ve scheduled a Greek 101 class for the coming term, in case you were waiting for one. It’s earlier in the day than I normally offer a class, which might suit European night owls, or people who are more free in their schedule.

Sign up here.

I’m pleased to announce the upcoming classes for my next teaching term, starting the end of April/beginning of May.

Greek 102 (Athenaze chs 9-16)

Greek 103 (Athenaze chs 17-24)

Greek 104 (Athenaze 25-30 + extra)

What about Greek 101?? I do hope to run an intro 101 class, but I don’t currently know when that could happen. If that interests you, please feel out the contact form on that page.

What about intro Latin? I don’t have the capacity to run an intro Latin class at the moment. I’m happy to recommend some other options for you.

Other classes:

Greek 236 : 1 Maccabees We’ll be reading this text in Greek and discussing it in Greek and some English.

Latin 238 – Plutarch returns. I aim to read and discuss some of his De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae.

I am continuing to work on developing video skills with a view to developing more video resources. It’s a process and a learning curve, limited by my available time!

I’ve held off writing this for a few reasons, but time is running out on me. Firstly, I enjoyed a summer holiday here in Australia, and did my best not to work. That was successful, but now it’s time for me to return from sun and sand and take up the digital pen again. Secondly, I was going to record this as a video but that will have to wait just a little longer.

Courses

This term I am definitely teaching the following courses:

Greek 101 (Athenaze chapters 1-8)

Greek 102 (Athenaze chapters 9-16)

Greek 103 (Athenaze chapters 17-24)

1 Corinthians

I have the capacity to teach some more classes, but I haven’t had the inspiration for other subjects or the interest from students, and so I am still on the fence, but if you had something that you really wanted to do, please let me know as it’s not too late for me to put something together and teach it. They would be at 7pm US Eastern time on Sundays or Tuesdays. I am also still determining whether I will offer something in an evening Australian time-slot. Again, if this interests you, please let me know! Knowing people would sign up for a course is a huge impetus to actually running one.

Writing

At the same time, I am not pushing myself to teach more and more, because I recognise there are limits on myself, and there are two areas I want to give more attention to in 2025. The first of these is writing. I can tell you that I have a Greek Novella that is so close to finished that I can smell it. I just have some final work on the indexing to go, and it should be available in the first quarter of this year.

Many people’s favourite question is to ask about my long-standing and somewhat stalled LGPSI project. This is one of the things I will be setting aside some more time for this year. I am thankfully quite robustly resilient to feeling undue pressure to get this done, because frankly I want to get it done as well as I possibly can.

More immediately, after this first Novella, I have some similar accessible short Greek writing projects to take up this year.

Video

The other new thing I have in mind for 2025 is to take up the challenge of producing video content. That’s a new area for me, it involves a learning curve in terms of every step of that process, and I expect it will suck before it’s good, but I’m determined to take those steps because I think we need more here and I think I have good things to contribute. If you’re at all in the communicate Greek ‘space’ online, then you’re aware as I am that there are a number (but a small number!) of people doing great work in this area. I’m very appreciative of them. I think there’s a space for a unique Seumas contribution too, and I’m looking forward to making it, and learning along the way.

That’s all for now: keep watching this space for more information throughout the year.

χαίρετε πάντες!

After 5 years of teaching students their way through Athenaze in an online environment, I’ve become very familiar with the book and its main narrative, and I’ve taught a lot of people all the way through both volumes now.

In 2025, as part of a number of other changes going on around SeumasU (which I’ll talk about in some other posts and in a video sometime coming up), I’m going to be streamlining the courses that currently comprise Greek 101-106.

The Old Way

Up to now, I have taught Athenaze over six terms of 10-weeks a-piece, for 60 hours of instruction. 101 gets through 6 chapters, and then each term goes through 5 more chapters. In the final 106 class, I take students up to ch 28 of the regular English edition, and then through a few sections from late in the Italian edition. The whole sequence takes 1.5 years to complete. I think this has been good, it does require students to put in some hours on their own to really succeed, but I’ve been pleased with the results given the constraints of the online format.

The New Way

In 2025, I’m going to streamline this sequence down to four terms (101-104), and increase the weekly session to 90 minutes. That does make the course move at a slightly more intense speed. Each term will cover half a volume. And I put it that way, because 101 will do chapters 1-8 and 102 will cover chapters 9-16. This aligns with the video support materials that I have available on Teachable (which can be purchased independently). 103 and 104 split up the contents of volume 2, along with the additional three sections from the Italian that I teach at the end.

Importantly, for each ‘quarter’, I have taken the main narrative text and divided it up across the ten weeks, so that I don’t have the current problem of having readings that are longer/shorter. The overall “words covered” stays more consistent each term, though you do cover more words in the second half.

This also means that, at the faster pace, you can cover all of Athenaze I and II in a single calendar year.

What this means if you’re an existing student

If you’re a current student in the following classes, I’ll be emailing all of you to offer some modifications (either a short bridging course, or delayed start) for adjusting to the new sequence.

What this means if you’re a prospective student

It means 2025 is a great year to take up Greek with me! I’ll be spending some of the Australian summer reviewing my past classes, and seeking to optimise and streamline my teaching for each part of this course, to hit the right bases at the right time, address the pressure points, and keep the class going in Greek. It means you can do the whole intro sequence in a single calendar year. And, even though the instructional time remains the same (60 hours throughout), it’s going to free me up a little to be working on some other great projects that I’ll be telling you about shortly!