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 forklift to lift things.

I held back at that point, because sometimes it’s just better to keep things simple. Now, however, I am indeed going to complicate things.

As the thought may surely arise, won’t the person lifting things on the factory floor also get stronger? That is to say, isn’t there a value in doing things that could be done by, e.g. AI, or even more simply by non-AI digital tools, and in fact the doing of them is good for us in some way or other?

Let me give a concrete example before returning to the world of metaphors. I regularly transcribe Greek texts by typing out my own copy of them. I’ve typed out all of Athenaze, and I’m currently typing out Thrasymachus. I do this somewhat because it’s useful for me to have manipulable versions of these texts, rather than static pdfs, but I also do it because it’s a kind of engagement with the text. Typing out Athenaze has had innumerable benefits for me: it allows attention to the text at a fine-grained level. It has improved my spelling quite a bit, and especially in learning where accents go and where to place macrons on Greek vowels. Now, when I type out non-macronised Greek, such as in Thrasymachus, I add macrons in. Indeed, this is (partly) why there are macrons in my Trojan war novella. There do exist tools, OCR, to turn pdfs into usable text, and they are of varying ability, but improving all the time. And there are great initiatives in this area, e.g. Open Greek and Latin, etc.. Especially to do things at a scale I never could.

So, the question can become, how do we decide what is factory work and what is gym work?

(With my thanks to Sarah for raising the issue). Or to put it another way, “what’s worth doing?”

I think humans do a lot of their best thinking analogically and in metaphors, which is my way of justifying an extended physical-training metaphor here. I’ve spent a good portion of my life now involved in physical training, and know a thing or two about strength training, etc.. But before we get to that, I want to revisit a fundamental distinction: language knowledge vs language acquisition.

In the world of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) it’s not particularly controversial to say that when we talk about language, there are really two types of ‘knowledge’. Acquisition is what we really mean when we talk about someone ‘knowing’ a language, that is they can operate in the language and are capable of some degree of reading, writing, speaking, listening. But a more fancy definition of acquisition is something like this:

the (mostly) implicit process of building a linguistic system by making form-meaning connections from the input. Basically, acquisition is what happens to you while you’re busy understanding messages.[1]

Knowledge of a language, that is externalised knowledge about a language, is a different thing. What we mean by this is something like, “being able to discuss the grammar of a language, its syntax, word formation, vocabulary, and all the meta-language about a language”. The best way to think about is, in my view, is to think of linguists and linguistics. A linguist doesn’t necessarily know many languages, indeed they could just ‘know’ one, their native language. But their job is to study language(s), and so they know a lot about languages.

That’s the acquisition vs knowledge distinction. And it’s key to all these discussions about language pedagogy, because “what’s worth doing?” depends on a prior set of questions, “what are we trying to achieve?”

When people set out to learn a language, what are they generally trying to achieve? I take it that most language learners are actually after acquisition. People learn French because they want to talk French, understand French, communicate in French. Few people (though some), set out to ‘learn French’ meaning ‘study French linguistically’. They exist though, they become (some degree of) a French linguist.

It shifts when we talk about historical languages though [2] . I find very few students who are interested only in acquisition for Ancient Greek and Latin. There is at least some interest in knowledge about.

Here’s the thing, though. At least as far I understand the field of SLA, there are a group of activities that contribute to learning knowledge-about, and there are a group of activities that contribute to acquisition, and they don’t necessarily have a lot of overlap. Learning about a language has little to no effect on acquiring a language, and language acquisition is not particularly correlated to learning about a language. You can see the latter in the many many people who acquired a second language, but couldn’t tell you anything meaningful, or even correct, about nouns, verbs, adjectives, they just know how to talk it. You can see the former in the many, many people that studied traditional grammar-translation methods and can tell you all about Latin syntax and morphology, but the only thing they can do with a Latin text is translate it into their native tongue.

What is difficult for me and other educators in this space, though, is that it is a persistent belief among (a) the general populace, (b) other teachers, (c) students!, (d) even ourselves at times, that teaching grammar, morphology, syntax, etc., etc., are either necessary or sufficient to produce acquisition.

So, finally we can go back to our question, “what’s worth doing?”, and let’s put it into my gym metaphor. What’s worth doing depends upon your goals. And that’s because of ‘Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand’. If I want to improve at running, then the core things I need to be doing are those that improve running: I should be doing a long, slow run each week with a heart-rate in zone 2, I should be doing a separate session with fast intervals to improve VO2 max or similar, and I should be doing some tempo or threshold work some other time. Those are best bang-for-back activities. I should also be doing some strength work, for the lower body in particular, and some mobility training. Those are less important. Way down the importance scale is doing 5 sets of bicep curls.

I would never prescribe this regime for someone whose primary goal was to become as big and strong as possible. Instead I’d be having them do 3-5 strength sessions in the gym, majoring on barbell exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench press, pull-ups, and with accessory work for smaller muscles and movement patterns, some mobility, and maybe a little bit of cardio so they don’t die of a heart-attack from walking up stairs and eating mountains of food each week.

It’s easy to program (at a basic level, don’t get me wrong!) for physical fitness. It’s harder to program for language learning and particularly for acquisition. Because there’s so much we don’t really know about how acquisition works. We know far more now than 50 years ago, but there’s lots of questions that remain.

Suppose we have 100 abstract units of learning. Hours, whatever. How do we divide up those units?

If we solely want knowledge-of, we will dedicate the bulk of this time to studying rules, paradigms, patterns, and explicitly testing and reinforcing this knowledge. A very small amount of this time will probably be spent taking actual sentences or texts or whatever, and applying that knowledge to produce a translation or similar. That activity, simply because it involves comprehensible input, will contribute towards acquisition, but it’s going to have minimal effect.

If we solely want acquisition, we will structure our time differently. We will spend most of our time reading comprehensible texts, listening to comprehensible audio. But if these are top-tier activities, why wouldn’t we spend all our time doing them?

For the same reason that although a barbell squat is legitimately an S-tier exercise, that doesn’t mean that a program should be only squats, or even 10 sets of squats. There are diminishing returns from spending all your units on the same thing, and there are synergistic benefits from doing other things.

If we want both, we have to run in essence a hybrid program, spending some of our time on activities for acquisition, some of our time on activities for knowledge-of, and accepting that there will be inevitable trade-offs by doing both. That is why, for the most part, I prefer to do meta-language about Greek in Greek, because then it’s learning about the language in a form that is still in the language, and hence comprehensible input grist-for-the-mill.

That still doesn’t all the endless varieties of questions around ‘what is worth doing?’ or even ‘what is the best possible thing I could be doing with X unit of learning expenditure’, but it starts to provide a framework for answering those questions.

Before I leave this topic for today, I want to touch upon one more thing. And that’s output.

When people like Henshaw, or Bill VanPatten or others talk about ‘acquiring a language’, they have a very specific definition of acquisition and language in mind. VanPatten would say that language is complex and abstract and that acquisition of a language is mental representation of that language, as an implicit knowledge.[1]

And, when I have heard VanPatten kind of pushed on this topic (in his old podcasts a few years back), even though acquisition as developing that implicit mental representation is driven by comprehensible input, he would at least acknowledge that developing a facility in output requires different things. I think the research tends to back this. When we talk about speaking or writing, we need different activities to build those skills. You can only output what has already input, and so input is always going to drive acquisition, but in terms of accessing one’s “passive knowledge”, and producing faster, more accurate speech or writing, there are specific things you can do that will pay off in that arena.

So, that’s one more ‘area’ to consider when we weigh up what’s worth doing. Just to keep life complicated.

And despite this, I still think there is some value in activities that might otherwise be considered ‘low-yield’. Typing out Greek text is not a high-yield acquisition activity, but it’s not without some benefit, in some areas. Doing English>Greek translation sentences is not what I’d recommend, but there’s worse things to do with your time. It has some benefit. Flashcards are not, in my view, the best way to learn vocab, but you will learn something from doing them

I try not to let the best become the enemy of the good, just figure out what’s worth doing in the moment, improve the things we do, and continue to shape learner activities and engagement as best I can towards acquisition, with a bit of explicit learning. It’s not necessarily, then, a bad thing to be a factory worker some of the time.

[1] Henshaw, Florencia G.; Hawkins, Maris D.. Common Ground: Second Language Acquisition Theory Goes to the Classroom (p. 3). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

[2] I think the best umbrella language here is historical languages. ‘Classical’ might be true in my particular case, but what I’m saying applies to all languages that have ceased being used as the active community language of an ongoing population. I think I got this nomenclature from Gregory Crane.

[3] VanPatten, Bill. Language (The Routledge E-Modules on Contemporary Language Teaching). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

(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, tech has ruined us, and the best life is found by unplugging from modern existence.

That is a kind of doomerism, but it is also founded in a whole range of things that are true.

What are the ‘liberal arts’?

There’s two ways to think about liberal arts. They are the following: the range of disciplines that belong to the free (man). That is a definition that stretches back into the classical world, to the Roman and Greek education traditions around artes liberales, the kind of education that a freeborn citizen of the city-state ought to have. Key, then, is that education in the ancient world equips you for public debate, civic engagement, serving in the legal system, participating in the military, and having a fundamental grasp of logic, mathematics, music, etc.; and most of all, as that tradition developed, it was based on classical rhetoric, the study of literature, and philosophy.

The way this tradition evolved in the Western world was essentially tied, as it was in antiquity, to class and wealth. The upper classes, and those that aspired to them, pursues this kind of education.

Schooling, in this view of things, is preparation for life as a citizen, and so that really leads into the second definition. Liberal arts are those that can make us free. They are in fact liberalising.

I think that is a more robust way of thinking about liberal arts, and the humanities in particular, because the humanities are ultimately shaped around pursuing the big questions of life, and engaging in dialogue about those questions, and bringing us into the ongoing conversation of (traditions) human beings about the nature of life, its meaning and purpose, the good, the beautiful, and how we are to live. Those are all things with intrinsic value that cannot, and should not, be reduced to ‘preparing for the labour market’.

The nature of threats to the humanities is multi-dimensional. There has, and always will be, the threat of economic rationalism of one sort of another. That threat sees education primarily as one cog of our economy. Education’s primary goal is to enable people to gain job-worthy skills, so they can go and do labour, and earn money, and so it’s a trade: someone pays money (you or someone else on your behalf) to upskill you, to be more useful to employers. Furthermore, it makes sense then to provide education of the kind that is profitable, both to students, to employers, and to the university (or similar), because the university itself has become a business.

The effect of neo-liberalism on universities has been devastating, but its full effects have yet to work themselves out. But it’s happening. Universities turn into businesses, and the “core” function of a university (whether education or research) is ultimately replaced with the bottom line of capitalism, make money. The way to do that is to hollow out your institution, remove power from academics, increase your managerial body, and turn your teachers into adjuncts (just like the gig-ification of the rest of the economy at the moment).

Generative AI is a new threat to the humanities and to universities, because if you can just plug a prompt into AI, and it will spit out something vaguely looking like an answer, or an essay, or research, what point is there in getting an education? Who needs to read Plato when I can just ask chatGPT or Claude to summarise it for me, make an argument, write an essay, earn my degree?

But AI is also just one piece of a larger and on-going set of troubling developments in modern life. I think this piece on ‘limbic capitalism’ captures it well. We live in a world designed to addict us, and technology, devices, apps, etc., are all highly effective means of one simple thing: capturing our attention and destroying our capacity for attention. I have felt that very acutely in my own life, and I continue to strive to set my own life up in a way that I am not driven to distraction and can focus for sustained lengths of time. I do not always win, and I feel like I am clawing back to where a younger, less-internet-attached, version of myself was. I sincerely pity the younger generations in this.

There are, as I see it, two sets of interrelated questions that require answering. The first is, what’s the point? That is, what positive case can be made for the humanities as a discipline.

The second is how? That is, how can we build a robust way forward to practice the humanities as a set of disciplines, in a way designed to resist these forces.

There are two types of arguments for the value of the humanities. N. Ángel Pinillos outlines them succinctly in his piece here. The first, which he is drawing from Jennifer Frey, is that there is an intrinsic value to the humanities. Pinillos agrees with this but criticises Frey for relying solely on it. I think he’s right in this regard. The intrinsic value of reading and debating Plato is only really valued if you already value it. It may be true, but it’s unconvincing to a broader public. Pinillos deploys a second type of argument, that the humanities are valuable because they teach something that cannot be acquired in another way, and which AI cannot and does not replace, and in fact demands: the ability to read carefully, understand arguments critically, and make cases persuasively. The practice of reading pages and pages of texts and then being required to generate your own pages and pages of text, produces critical thinkers. AI short-cuts that process, but your ability to assess AI outputs, to argue with them, to see through the illusions precisely requires the kind of training that AI usage itself cannot give you.

When I first seriously got ‘into’ teaching classical languages as living languages, it was (and remains) something of an outsider movement. That is, all the primary initiatives around speaking Latin, and the much smaller movement to speak Ancient Greek, happen on the peripheries of academia. They are organisations, associations, small groups, clubs, etc. If it happens in institutional spaces, it happens primarily in schools, almost never colleges or universities. There have been some small inroads into the institutional world of tertiary education, but it remains very much ‘outside’ the gilded cages of academia. Most academics still look on the idea of speaking Ancient Greek or Latin as quaint, silly, a hobby, and not relevant to the serious business of mastering grammar and memorising vocabulary. They are wrong.

There is, however, a bigger question about the place of humanities and its relationship to universities as we know them. The duality and tension inherent in tertiary education, that is whether it is about forming free citizens or whether it’s about creating job-ready employees, stands at the nexus of the crisis around AI, humanities, and the ongoing place of the university. As Jared Henderson writes, if humanities degrees ‘certify’ critical thinking skills, and “if AI lets you cheat your way through college… degrees can no longer serve this signaling function…. In short, having a college degree doesn’t mean you learned anything that will make you more valuable to a future employer.”

RIP college degrees.

But if universities will not, or cannot, sustain the humanities, and if the humanities are valuable in and of themselves, then “we need to find ways for these disciplines to thrive outside of the university.” And I think we are seeing that happen already, to some extent.

Henderson thinks that looks like ‘secular monasteries’, isolated communities dedicated to research and labor. I don’t know if that’s a viable or likely vision. It is worth entertaining the idea though. It’s an idea that somewhat echoes anti-tech calls like Molly Worthen’s ‘Why Universities should be more like Monasteries’ (NYT, paywalled), or more recently and in a Christian vein, Nadya Williams, ‘Instead of Embracing AI, Universities should go Medieval.’ Low or anti tech, high on relationality, small in scale, with a renewed focus on what education is for. That is a vision that ought to thrive, but it’s very hard to do.

I think, however you slice the pie, that the University as we know it is finished. What we don’t know, yet is what that actually means. I suspect universities will continue to exist for some time yet. Some of them changing their role and function, others doubling down the ‘education as business, let’s make money from students’ road, others existing on as zombie-institutions. It’s what comes next that interests me most.

One such enterprise that continues to hold up a model of post-institutional humanities is the Catherine Project, the initiative of Zena Hitz to take the core of the Great Books curriculum of a place like St. John’s College, and translate it into a post-institutional online set of communities. That, and many other endeavours, give me some hope for the humanities beyond the crumbling college walls.

I predominantly teach people languages, Ancient Greek and Latin, as spoken and living languages. I do this because I think it’s the best possible pedagogy for learning those languages, indeed any languages. The reason most people want to learn those languages though is not because they want to spend their time talking in them in particular, like ordering lattes in Ancient Greek and doing their banking in Latin. They want to read and understand texts. It is still a fundamentally text-oriented goal that drives people to learn these goals.

And in facilitating that, I have a very renaissance humanist impulse, ad fontes. For my part, I want them to read texts, and I want to read texts, and I want us to do that not by reading cliff notes or GAI summaries of texts, but by picking up ancient and not-so-ancient texts, in the original languages, and being able to understand them, discuss them, and perhaps even join in the ongoing conversation, the dialogue, about the things that matter in life.

David Bennet writes here about the emergence of a new humanities in the face of AI, the need to re-engage that deeper question of what a human is, what a human is for, and what is owed to a human being. I resonate with this deeply, not least because of the very (explicitly) Augustinian way he gets there. Late stage capitalism, the rise of Muskism, the tyranny of tech bros, and the general enshittification of our digital age, are all forces arrayed towards the dehumanisation of humanity. Humanity’s need is for ongoing renewal, and we will find that through the ongoing practice of the arts that make us free.

When it comes to teaching and the question of AI, I am never an optimist nor a doomer. I have a sceptical and generally critical stance towards AI; I’m mindful of significant ethical questions about AI both in general and in specifics; I recognise that it is significantly and amazingly useful in some regards. A friend of mine, Tom Keeline, gave me the following line which is echoing in my head as I think through these issues:

Discerning how best to use AI is figuring out whether the task in front of you is factory work or gym work. To analyse a text of Greek, provide a categorised list of forms, tally up different words, run parsing on every form, and provide all that kind of data in a usable data set is laborious work, that can be done easily and well by AI (or even non-AI digital tools), and importantly doing it yourself in a more manual way isn’t going to improve your language skills.

Asking AI to translate a text, or to read it and summarise it, or do anything of these sorts, is asking AI to work out for you. You won’t develop the muscles you need. The work of learning a language is precisely the work of spending time exposing yourself to comprehensible inputs in the target language. Short-cut that, and you won’t learn a language.

One of the greatest dangers for students of languages using AI is this: it’s only in knowing the language that you are able to evaluate the answers AI gives you. I have played around with AI and languages enough to see this for myself. When AI is wrong, it’s always confidently wrong, and yet if you don’t know enough to know whether it’s right or wrong, you can’t evaluate what AI is feeding you. Which goes back to Pinillos argument above. The skill to evaluate AI cannot be gotten from AI itself (despite what it tells you).

Of course, many will ask whether we need to learn any languages at all, if AI is going to be able to serve as a universal translator for us. I think that if you think the answer to that question is yes, you betray the fact that you don’t really understand the value of knowing a language at all. This, echoing the above argument, is somewhat circular – you need to value it in order to value it.

To make the ancients speak, to engage in the ongoing conversation about what a human is for, and how to live a flourishing life, remains the goal beyond the goal in my teaching. I teach languages because only in learning a language can we approach those ancient texts, ad fontes, and ask them cui est homo?

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 video about it, which you can watch below. But here’s my shorter, less rambling, text-version. Kevilex is an online reading platform for Ancient Greek, which has various ancient Greek texts on it, chunked up appropriately, and you can bring up a particular passage, it will provide parsing and lexical information upon clicking a word, and perhaps most importantly, it tracks the vocabulary you are learning or know. Which allows you to see at a glance what you know and don’t know, and can guide you to pick new texts or passages to tackle, based on how much you know already.

It includes an integrated flashcard function, similar to Anki, that will let you do spaced-repetition recall on words you are learning. It also has the functionality to import new Greek texts, if what’s already up there isn’t what you’re learning/reading.

There are a few other interfaces online for reading Greek texts, but this is one that has really caught my interest. It has a UI that I think is easy to navigate, pleasing to use, and its features are the ones I’ve really always wanted in such a platform. I’m using it regularly now in my own reading, and plan to for some time.

So go and check it out, see if it works well for you, and consider supporting it financially if you are able as well.

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 particular which I think is full of interesting, provocative, and useful pieces that are worth reading and considering. I don’t agree with all of Henry’s opinions, but I do think they are often on-point. Let me highlight a few pieces worth your time.

Two standards of Graecitas, in which Henry eviscerates us for notions of Attic vs Koine vs High Koine.

“Please” and Polite requests, in which Henry really does some stellar work in talking about attested Greek usage for politeness strategies.

The Reading list, which will take you several years and is probably overly idealistic, but is nonetheless now informing some of my own personal reading programming.

And the several recent posts on prosody, cola and commata, and the formatting of Greek texts.

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 since 2019, with around 300 students. I’m proud of what we’ve built here, and excited to see it develop further.

Everyone’s favourite question is always to ask about LGPSI. I’m currently committed to a writing habit of at least 100 words a day, and I’ve been working away at the early chapters. I do need some more people to join my feedback team though, so if you have an interest in providing feedback and input on the drafts of v2.0, get in touch.

Okay, on to the new round of classes.

Greek 101: Our core introductory course, 15 hours, covering Athenaze chapters 1-8.

Greek 102: Our follow-on intro course, covering Athenaze 9-16.

Greek 181: This is an intro class, working with the v2.0 of my LGPSI reader. It’s super cheap, and it’s on in the Australian evenings. You’ll read a lot of Greek, and also help in the development of this reader.

Greek 201: Athenaze, the Italian Job. This course is designed for those who have read volume 2 of Athenaze, and want to consolidate/extend their Greek. We’ll be reading only the extra sections from the Italian edition of volume 2, starting at ch 17. Each chapter is long, so we’ll be moving at a faster pace, doing more discussion of the text, and I’ll be setting some outside-class tasks for you (optional, as always).

Greek 239: Basil of wealth and slavery. A more advanced course, we’ll be reading some excerpts from two key homilies by Basil, dealing with those themes. Basil isn’t the easiest, but he’s not the hardest. Conversation and discussion will mostly be in Greek.

Latin 103: A follow-on intro course for Latin, working with Familia Romana, chs 22 onwards. This class has a slightly adjusted timetable.

Latin 245: A 9 week course in which we’ll read Minucius Felix’ Dialogue/Apologetic, Octaviua. This is a classical, rhetorically polished, Latin defence of the Christian faith.

In the meantime, I am already cooking up ideas for Term 4, and 2027. Including Thucydides in Latin, a transitional course for going from Athenaze to Homer, a Homeric reading course, the return of RPG classes, and more!

It’s time for a slate of new classes at SeumasU, starting April 21st. Some of the times for these are a little unusual, so I have highlighted that in a few cases.

Greek

Greek 101 and 102 are running this term, both working with Athenaze. These are part of my foundational intro Greek sequence. 101 is running at an earlier time than usual, US Eastern 4pm.

For more intermediate/advanced type offerings, this term I have classes on the Epistle to Diognetus, which is running in a bit of a late-night slot, 9:30pm US Eastern. On Monday evenings I intend to tackle (some) of Isaiah in the LXX. I also have an ongoing group working on Herodotus.

Latin

Latin 102 continues on in Lingua Latina PSI.

For a more advanced course, aka fun reading and discussing, I’ll be dipping into Mark Riley’s Neo-Latin Reader on Monday nights.

(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 or universities. In this post I want to provide a guided walking-tour to what some of those issues are, why they arise, and my thoughts on tackling them.

Institutional resistance

Often it’s the case that your broader institution is resistance to the idea of communicative approaches. That can happen in a few different ways, and at different levels. For example, I have taught at an institution which was part of a broader conglomerate, in which the curriculum that was set for Greek was really beyond my purview, and it had built into it a clear set of expectations about grammar and analysis. In my case, I could to some extent ignore that, but that’s only possible to an extent. Sometimes it’s because higher-ups have set ideas about language teaching, and it’s going to be about negotiating difference, proving alternatives, buying the chance to demonstrate what’s possible.

Fellow instructor resistance

Student resistance

What all three of these have in common

Self-resistance

For all this, there is also self-resistance. Sometimes you will be resistant or reluctant to your own efforts. I am! This can happen for a few reasons. Firstly, most of us began, or spent considerable time in traditional-type programs. We also often love grammar ourselves. So it can be easy to fall back to what we know, and want to teach the way we were taught. Secondly, we can doubt our own abilities or our approach, and think, “actually, maybe I do need to teach explicit linguistic knowledge. Maybe that is the way.” Thirdly, we can internalise the pressures and resistances from outside groups, and find ourselves simply conforming to make our life easier.

Competing goals, expectations, outcomes

One of the things then that helps clarify what communicative approaches are all about, is having the conversations about goals, expectations, outcomes, and methods.

If, at the end of (X time period) a student wants to read in a language and understand the text without having to translate, (and/or) be able to listen, write, and speak that language, then that goal is acquisition. And even though there are lots of things up for debate in Second Language Acquisition, we have a pretty good idea as a field that the way to get to that goal is through ‘communicative methods’, built upon principles like Comprehensible Input.

If, at the end of (X time period) a student wants to be able to analyse a piece of language (a sentence, paragraph, text) then that goal is really explicit linguistic knowledge and applied analysis. It doesn’t require them to really understand the language ‘as a language’, to acquire it, or to be able to use it in any way. The proof of that is to look at linguists, and linguistics students, who often have little ability in a language, but this doesn’t stop them analysing language units. The way to gain this kind of knowledge and ability is through explicit learning of linguistics.

There are two perennial problems that plague both biblical languages/studies programs, and classics departments. Firstly, it’s the mistaken belief that the method that applies to the latter (explicit linguistic knowledge) produces the goal of the former (language acquisition). History, and the contemporary world, is full of students who learnt grammar and can’t read, or produce, a sentence. Secondly, it’s that the tradition of grammar teaching in such departments is often hived-off from modern linguistics. This is more acutely true in biblical studies programs, and it’s not universally true, but the philological tradition that dominates these departments often just isn’t really engaged with modern linguistics, or if it is, only at the upper levels of teaching and research.

In an ideal world, the goals of a teaching course, the expectations of students (and other stake-holders) about outcomes, the forms of testing used to see if those goals are being reached, and the method of teaching, should all align. This, of course, is hardly ever as true as it should be. But if it were, we would at least reduce some of these tensions. But if you are expecting students trained in acquisition to be able to produce results on a grammar-focused quiz, of course they will fail. For the same reason, frankly, that if you ask native speakers to explain the grammar of their own language there is no guarantee that they’ll be correct, unless they’ve been formally schooled in the grammar of their native language. Vice versa, if you test students trained on grammar by asking them to do listening, speaking, or writing tasks, or heaven forbid have a live conversation, they are going to fail abysmally.

At the end of the day, we simply have to recognise that these are not two different methods to the same destination, and that communicative based approaches will not, do not, in fact cannot offer ‘a different, better, faster’ way to the same destination. But neither do I concede that grammar-translation is an approach that will produce communicative competency, even in reading, except as a by-product of copious amounts of unintentional comprehensible input along the way. And if we want to produce both, we are going to have to teach for both, and assess for both, and that is going to take more time. But maybe, just maybe, we’ll end up with students who both know a language and know about a language.

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! (Or if you prefer an apple link)

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.