Greek
Right now I’m heading into week 11 of a 12 week semester teaching a Greek 1 class Koine. I’ve found it frustrating, mainly because I’m frustrated with myself. And as I reflect on that, I decided that if I’m given the opportunity to teach this again,
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The problem with an acquisition-based program in a seminary setting is time. A standard, seminary-type language course represents a 2-semester sequence in which students get drilled through a traditional grammar explanation of the language, with some practice on translating Greek passages to English, and are expected by
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I suspect a lot of people (though perhaps not the general demographic still reading my blog) will find this advice objectionable. There is a school of thought that hates students using Loebs. And, they have a point. If you think the goal of classical language learning is to (a) internalise
Greek
Below I have adapted (a lot is basically translated) a short story in Ancient Greek. It's very closely based off a post from Magister P, who runs an amazing blog from which I have learnt a lot of stuff. In particular, I've been quite taken by
Latin
Lately, I've been really getting into.... podcasts. Previosuly, I'd never quite had a good 'set-up' in my life to make listening to them useful, but that changed and now I'm on the bandwagon. I mostly, though, listen to target language podcasts
Language
Recently, I crunched some personal numbers. Using Italian Athenaze, a text I'm reading for CI purposes, I clocked myself reading about a page of text (approx 130 Greek words) at 50 secs a page, which calculated out at 156 wpm. That's pretty decent, I would say,
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Interviewer: So, your CV has a lot of Greek on it, but Bill Smith the Third here is our New Testament lecturer and will be covering that area. Me: ὦ, καλῶς. σὺ εἶ διδάσκακλος τῆς ἑλληινκῆς γλώσσης; Bill: Um, what did you say? Me: σὺ δύνῃ λαλεῖν ἑλληνιστί; ἐγώ σοι
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So, you’ve become convinced (probably by someone else) that communicative/comprehensible input based approaches to language acquisition are the way to go. But you still need to produce students who have an explicit, and often advanced, knowledge of grammar. That is, you want students to acquire language but you
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How much input can you get? I ran some numbers... Average conversation speed is, apparently 140-160 words a minute. We can understand speeech much faster, but we don't like to produce speech much faster. Let's be conservative though, and say that we are gettin 100
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Reading in 3s is a way to structure reading a text so that you cover it 3 times over, sequentially. This is easiest explained by a 3-page model: you read 3 pages, but you only move your bookmark forward one page each session. Thus, you're always reading
Greek
It's a fair question (raised by my also-interested-in-linguistics-wife). Here's my short answer: a communicative approach will produce better readers, with better reading ability, faster. To understand why I hold that position, we need two puzzle pieces: how Grammar/Translation thinks it creates
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If we take the figure of 98% vocabulary coverage as what is needed to read a text at a comprehensible and 'fluent' level, so that the unknown 2% is understandable by context or not significant enough to frustrate understanding, then for the New Testament corpus, that requires learning