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.