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One of the critiques I (πολλάκις; ἐνίοτε;) encounter about a living language methodology is that it’s slow. That it doesn’t get us directly to reading texts (the main interest of most historical language students), That it is inefficient (why do I need to learn the word for ‘butcheress’
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I’m surprised how often this question comes up. But I’m asked this relatively commonly. First, a very, very brief précis of the main options 1. Reconstructed Koine (Buth or Buth-similar options) 2. Erasmian (US) 3. Restored Attic (Allen-Daitz) 4. Modern 5. UK traditional Erasmian is what
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Inspired by a recent conversation, and again a question that I get every now and again. My suggestion is to weight your reading towards the easy (anything you can read with 98-100% comprehension, at a good reading pace), with some intermediate (anything you can read with 90% comprehension, and
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A couple of people have asked me recently what this is like, and expressed something of their frustration that they can't go from "mental translation" to "thinking in (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Klingon)" I do think this is hard to explain, especially if you haven&
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My biggest regret is that in all my time as a student I never took the step to start a group to talk Latin or Greek. Now, admittedly I did a lot of my classics, in particular, as a distance student, and as a disconnected graduate student, but for most
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It's over at https://thepatrologist.com/content/files/2026/07/easygreekreading-wordpress-com.html You'll get (a minimum of) once a week easy greek readings! It's that simple, for now. I hope to see the project develop in new directions as well, but let&
DH
Let me tell you about a little side-project I'm cooking up. One of the great advantages Latin students have in seeking a lot of reading content, is that between the easy reading material that some Latin teachers are pumping out, and the products of the Direct Method,
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Technique: re-read something you've read before Why is this even a post? There's zero new content here, zero ideas that you haven't read elsewhere or thought of yourself. But the fact it, so few learners spend time re-reading text that they'
Language
This is probably the most sub-blog post I've written, as let's be honest that it's a response to a twitter conversation built of a previous post, a twitter conversation in which I appeared more like a bystander. Here's the counter-view:
Language
Technique: Listen-Read-Listen Here's a technique that works well if you're intentionally trying to develop aural comprehension skill. You need an audio source with text, so generally either (a) a recording that has an accompanying transcript (I use this for Gaelic with a 5 minute
Language
Recently I was reading a document about extensive reading and it highlighted the difference between intensive and extensive reading in the above terms (reading to learn, learning to read). Intensive reading is reading 'above' our level, or sometimes below our level but with a lot of analysis thrown
Greek
Recently I was reading an introductory Greek grammar for which the 'reading' exercise had the instructions (non verbatim): 1. Read aloud 2. Parse all words fully 3. Translate Firstly, commendable at all that "read aloud" is an instruction at all. But as usual I think this