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Those unfortunate enough to be following me for a sufficiently long time know that apart from my work in Latin and Greek, I am also a student of Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig). I have been studying Gaelic for at least as long as Latin, which is to say far too long.
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Generally speaking, I don't consider flashcards to be a high-yield activity for vocabulary acquisition. However I don't think it's entirely pointless. Especially if it's well-implemented, and if the time spent on this kind of revision is (a) liminal time that
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I'm a big advocate for playing games in a target language. I think it creates a language focus which isn't the language itself, so that you are communicating about something else, not about language, and that creates a need to use the language actively and passively
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We're now drawing in on the end of the 3rd year in which I've offered continuous structured small-group classes online in Ancient Greek and Latin. And one thing I have been working both on and towards is offering intermediate and advanced type classes. What do
Greek
Biblingo is an app developed for learning the biblical languages (very specifically, New Testament Koine Greek, Biblical Hebrew), through a (semi-)communicative approach. I became aware of Biblingo some time ago, and followed some of their pre-launch promotional material, but more recently decided to test it out with a
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Of course, you can just go and read the course descriptions, but it might be helpful to give an overview of what I'm running: Greek 101, 103, 105 These are all courses keyed to Athenaze, where we work through the text of the book 5 chapters every 10
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Last year I set up a small group that made an effort to write some short original fiction in Latin and/or Greek. We set up a google group and used it for some informal discussion and encouragement. Two lessons I learned from last year: 1. Even 3000 words is
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Today I want to get back to talking about “authentic” texts and language learning. It would behoove you to read the prior post that sets this one up. Firstly, let’s talk about terminology. Very often people talk about “authentic texts”, and in classical languages they really mean something like
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This started as a long twitter thread about something else, but I’ve split it into at least two posts (that might be ironic). First, let me suggest one (among many) analogies for language learning - climbing a slope to the top of a mountain. In our case, the mountain summit
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So, I recently saw this blog post, and I am offering something of a public rejoinder here. I don’t know Carla Hurt, and I actually have no particular issue with the specific intervention suggested here, but there’s a systemic misunderstanding of CI, Krashen, and Ørberg in this post
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In Greek, my understanding on Voice has been largely shaped by Kemmer, Allen, and R. Aubrey. To whit, Ancient Greek operates with an Active-Middle voice system, and the sooner you come to grips with that and jettison concepts like a distinct morphological passive, and 'deponent', the better.
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Apart from having useful Grammar Terms up one's sleeve, it's also very useful just to know how to ask basic questions and respond to them. Here's a cheat-sheet of sorts (Greek Question Words) that I have drafted up recently. I'll keep