Our friend James helpfully asked:

Did you ever have communicative Greek training with a more fluent speaker? If not, how did you get to this point? Do you have a post on what you did? Despite the apparent contradiction, do you think it’s possible to therefore get to a certain point of speaker fluency on ones own?

Firstly, let’s remind ourselves that I’m not that great a speaker. I’m past the Tarzan stage, but there’s plenty I can’t do with the language. But I can hold soliloquies with myself on familiar topics with familiar vocabulary. And I can have basic conversations about texts or concrete things.

So, I don’t want to overplay the experience I’ve had with others, but nor do I want to underplay. I had to think this over, and I did do about 50 hours all up in group classes with Halcomb over at Conversational Koine Institute, about 5 years back now.  I do think that was incredibly useful for me, but I don’t think it contributed a huge amount overall to reaching this level of speaking. It did show me something of what was possible, about the same time I was experimenting in Mongolia with some basic Where Are Your Keys approaches, and trying my hand at an ill-fated Ørberg conversion.

Other than that, I did work through the self-study materials by Randall Buth at the Biblical Language Center. That I did, prior to the above work with Halcomb, and I found it helpful to (a) transition my pronunciation mostly to a restored Koine, even if I have vestiges of Erasmian or a lingering overrealised aspiration problem. It also (b) helped me to cement down quite a few fundamental phrases.

Thirdly, I do do some regular online chats with a more advanced speaker. That too probably didn’t get me to this point, and we’ve only clocked about 10 hours together, but it’s incredibly useful to me. I think there’s great advantage in speaking to people above you and below you in communicative proficiency.

Fourthly, though, there’s just a long familiarity with the language and with Koine texts. I started learning Koine in 2003, and can’t think of a year since when I haven’t been doing something with the language. And since at least 2007 I’ve been advocating, exploring, researching, and experimenting with more active/communicative/living approaches to historical languages. And I’ve had the experience of learning other languages as ‘live’ ones, and working on speaking Latin, and this all is fuel for the fire. Even if a tonne of my language exposure has been to written texts, it’s still exposure, and to the extent that that has been sufficient input for acquisition, it can create spoken output.

Fifthly, apart from the language I’ve gotten from being a student of others, I’ve worked at speaking more Greek to those under my tutelage, as best I can and as much as possible. This, too, is a context for learning how to speak, even if I am not learning more language per se. The more I can speak with students, both (a) the more I get to put my own communicative competencies into practice, and (b) I realise the gaps in my own language. Gaps that can be filled by going away and figuring out what to put in them (perhaps ironically, in the heat of conversation my brain regularly reaches for a Latin expression if it doesn’t have a Greek one to hand).

Do I think someone could get to a certain point of speaker-fluency on one’s own? Yes, but with considerable difficulty, non-ideally and non-optimally. It’s taken 15 years for me to get to this point, and I reached the point where I could teach certain classes in Mongolian in 2, and preach in 2.5 years (not in anyway linguistically or literary sophisticated, but genuinely Mongolian sermons composed in Mongolian idiom). It shouldn’t take 15 years to get to this level of spoken Greek. I do hope that I will get a lot more fluent a lot more quickly in the years to come. And I hope it won’t take the next generations of learners as much time or effort to reach the level that I have so far attained.