Negation in Ancient Greek
When is a not a not and when is a not not a not I wanted to call today's post this, but I knew I would regret that when searching for my own post in 3 years' time. Specifically, what do you make of 'double'
Why grammar-translation is wrong and doesn't work
Just putting it out there. I will never cease to be amazed at how committed many people are to the Grammar-Translation method. Here I want to succinctly (re-)state the case for why this method is fundamentally flawed. To do so, let's look briefly at two things:
2026 Term 4 Classes
I'm very pleased to let you know about my slate of classes planned for the final term of 2026, starting in October. I'll be running two of my introductory Athenaze courses: 102 and 103, covering chs 9-16 and 17-24 respectively. I will run a
Learn to speak Old Irish
Several weeks ago I came across Francesco Felici's doctoral dissertation on teaching Old Irish as a living language. I wrote a little bit about it here, and some other thoughts here, and probably some more to come in a subsequent post or two (the other chapters of his
Why learn ancient Greek when minority languages are dying? A response
Again at the recently held TCLS2026 I heard my friend and colleague in language teaching, Carla Hurt, address almost the above topic. Her topic was slightly different, because it focused on the question of Australian Aboriginal Languages. I thoroughly enjoyed Hurt's presentation, and appreciated how she sought to
What's a textbook for?
I recently attended the bi-annual Teaching Classical Languages Symposium here in Sydney. I don't have a single post abut the TCLS overall, and so I'll say a bit about it here by way of introduction. TCLS has been running for 8 years now, I believe,
LGPSI 2.0, August 2026 Update
People have mostly stopped asking me about LGPSI, which I suppose is nice in one way, though a bit concerning in another. Well, I have mostly good news about what's happening with it. But if you don't know what LGPSI even is, go here. Firstly, I
Learning sounds you don't have
I long ago grew pretty tired of the pronunciation wars over Ancient Greek. I have opinions, have read a bunch of the literature, and have made my piece with how I currently pronounce Greek in different contexts. This doesn't mean I don't care about it, but
The hours problem
I'm running lots of calculations these days, you might notice. Some of that is driven by projects I'm working on, some of it is me being curious. I'm also back into reading a lot more SLA literature than in recent years. You might be
How many words do you need to have read?
Lately I've been thinking a lot about the need for extensive reading, and how that's challenging for Ancient Greek, but also very necessary. In particular, the question I've been asking, or set of questions, looks like the following: 1. How many 'words'
What 98% comprehensibility looks like
I am sure that I have posted this before, but I have found myself re-referencing it several times in the past couple of weeks, and so I had to go digging to find what I had in mind. Now, at least, I can just search my own website. Back
10 years of SeumasU
If you are fortunate enough to have any of our excellent merch, you might notice that it has an 'established' date of 2016. That was me trying to retroactively figure out when I started teaching online. But actually on May 1st, 2015, I received a polite email inquiry