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.
Thank you for this peek behind the curtain!
This has me intrigued:
“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.”
So what’s better? (If there’s a way to reasonably answer that here, without writing a whole second blog post, which, by the way, I would be totally up for reading!)
The short answer is that sequencing based on grammar isn’t optimal, and Ørberg is still trying to get you to inductively teach-yourself grammar. Arguably a communicative approach in which you were taught by a human being in real-world situations is the absolute best.
Thanks for the update! As always, looking forward to this!
Dear Mr. Macdonald,
I would like to offer some words of advice regarding the LGPSI project.
Firstly, I myself have tried making my own L_PSI, for Russian, due to the original by Jensen being lost by time.
Indeed, there is a strong temptation to just translate the LLPSI, maybe changing one or two words here and there to avoid something that clearly echoes of Latin culture, but I too noticed that, while Ørberg and Jensen did a wonderful work for their era, their books are stifled by the approach of teaching grammar sequentially, even if by doing it inconsciously first and consciously second. As an example of this, the LLPSI uses the first two declensions to introduce the various cases one by one, then just dumps the entire third declension in two chapters. Though a key difference from Latin, if I may present my opinion, is that Ancient Greek (and also many modern languages), do not allow for sentences to progress from a simplified-to-erudite gradient in a grammatically sequential manner. As an example, writing Ancient Greek without using the various μέν, δέ, οὖν, γάρ and all the various apocopated forms would make the sentences sound off, and this without even considering how, outside of the indicative, it is not the present tense that is the primary choice for “basic sentences”, but rather the aorist (if I may misuse the adjective “primary” in this vein: a basic command in Greek would use the aorist, as it’s a punctual action). In reading Jensen’s book for Italian, being Italian myself, I can say the text looks bizarre, in that it may be grammatically correct, but is far from idiomatic in many places, way more than the simplified nature of a teaching chapter written in the 1960s should be allowed to.
So, returning on what I tried to do, divorcing myself from the easy path of just copying Jensen or Ørberg with a couple changes here and there, I decided to follow a completely different road:
1. Do not care about grammatically sequential introduction. Or, better said, do not stifle myself with trying to obey it in its entirety: sometimes, a basic word is slightly irregular in declension, but it being basic means that it will be repeated a lot of times anyway through the following chapters that one will be naturally exposed to its irregularity, just on more chapters rather than in a single one focused on it.
2. Consider what is really needed for a language to be considered learnt. I appreciate You mentioning the CEFR, whose level descriptions are indeed those I would like to follow and those I am most used to hear about here, though even when trying to confront myself with CEFR vocabulary lists of various language certificates, I could only find a weird chaos that seemed to imply that all topics are shared by all levels and the difference is simply in how much precise the words you can recognize are. This may be paedagogically sound, but I can’t help but think how weird it was for me, going to Germany, not being able to understand what the car mechanic was asking or struggling with reading my work contract, simply because I had some detail but not enough. I thus decided to try to be as exhaustive as I can, when introducing various topics and – with my personal experience having lived abroad – having a second priority gradient for topics to introduce. Namely, beyond the usual ones schools and language courses use – greetings, family, colours, etc. – I decided to consider that, were anybody to use my book to learn a language (though the quality of its writing, I’d call mediocre, and the conversational side is not explored enough), they should be able to stop at any point and be able to use that language somewhat proactively based on how much they needed to use it: from just transiting the country, to being able to go shopping, to finally being able to apply for a job and sign a rent contract. Understandably, this latter part would look absurd for Ancient Greek, a dead language whose main usage is to read historical documents, be it literature, poetry or Roman records.
Now, the reason I am talking about Russian is that, before composing my book, I could not speak any more Russian than a couple greetings and some swear words. I composed my book in my own native language and – although demented it may sound – fed it to a LLM to translate it in my target language (I am not and was not in the financial position to hire an actual translator), one chapter at a time, with me learning from the translated chapter before feeding it a new one, so that if the LLM hallucinated a grammatical structure that was not there, I could have more easily spotted it, since it would have looked spurious in the translation; and if the spurious thing was actually true, it meant I learned a new structure. That alone was enough to put me at a C1 level of Russian in regards to reading (and with just some more exercise with audio and video materials, I did almost pass the TORFL C1 exam, failing only the section about grammar).
With this experience, although biased, I can say that it is fallacious to consider Ørberg’s success in the recognizability of the words introduced in the first chapters merely by their international usage; the first words are actually explained through the images: the first chapter has a huge map with various labels and it’s easy to understand that when the label “Gallia” is in a zone towered by a bigger label saying “Europa”, I can grasp the sentence “Gallia in Europa est” even without any knowledge of geography. (And in the books by Jensen, there’s little room for internationalisms when introducing words referring to humans and family members from the first chapters).
As I understand, the LGPSI is a pastime with no set deadline: thus, You have the freedom to expand its draft even without it being perfect from the start; in fact, that would be a most sound practice, as something we may presume to be perfect may prove itself to be in complete disharmony with later parts of the project. Furthermore, I would give up the sequential grammar approach, not in its entirety, but as a requirement for the lexicon and morphology to use in the chapters: if a word is outside the student’s current grammatical knowledge, but it’s basic and common, they shall simply be warned they’ll encounter its full forms in later chapters. And to avoid calquing Ørberg, I would say to just start from scratch in regards to what topics and lexical sets are to be introduced, using exhaustive vocabulary from the start and not just bare forms to later supply with detailed ones (what good is it to know only of the words “root” and “tuber”, when at the market one is going to find carrots, parsnips and potatoes?), and to try to choose their priority based on the idea that, if a student were to halt their studies in Ancient Greek, with the topics they’ve already learnt they would nevertheless be able to access some coherent microcosm of it.
I conclude by expressing my appraisal for You and Your project, hoping the former shall progress and eventually see its completion.
Yours truly,
Giovanni (a.k.a. Iohannes Italus on Discord)
Thanks very much for this long and helpful comment! Several of these things I have already thought of and absolutely agree with. Other things here give me some great ideas to consider.