Courses

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  1. “The Road to Latin” was written by three women from the Cleveland public school system in Ohio. Two were of European descent and one of African American descent. Their names are Helen M. Chestnutt, Martha Whittier Olivenbaum, Nellie Price Rosebaugh, and they were listed as the authors in alphabetical order.
    There is NO evidence about how the book project and its design was divided up between them nor has there been a close study of the book’s illustrations.
    Read the work of Michele Valerie Ronnick who has been studying Helen Chesnutt since 2005. See ‘In Search of Helen Maria Chesnutt (1880-1969),’ “ New England Classical Journal” 48(2021): 110-121 or watch the illustrated lecture she gave inaugurating a scholarship in Helen Maria Chesnutt’s name on YOUTUBE.

  2. Looking forward to seeing what you do this year Seumas. I’m planning on getting back into Athenaze this year and am just now discovering your Galilaiathen which I’m sure to use when I do!

  3. Yes, I’d be interested. I’ve been doing a reading class on St Augustine’s Confessions for the past few years. I’d like to find something similar in Greek. My reading comprehension of Greek is probably intermediate. I’m a retiree who tries to read the classics in retirement.

    • Thanks Barry,
      Could you send me an email or fill out the contact form, so I have a way to connect to you?

  4. “Has risen” is correct in America if you’re using current English. “Is risen” is used by people quoting from the King James Bible, or who don’t know correct American usage. I don’t know what the current usage in the UK or Australia is.

  5. The article’s discussion of the nuances of the middle is very helpful. I’m still a little unclear in my thinking about those, so any light is welcome.

  6. It would probably do me good to re-visit your earlier posts about the middle voice in Greek.

  7. I think it is helpful to note that this is something they should be familiar with in their native language. In English for example consider the sentence “he knew that she was there”, and ask what “that” means. The question doesn’t even really make sense, “that” doesn’t mean anything, it just serves the function of turning a clause into a direct object. I think the functional perspective is particularly important when looking at the particles, otherwise it’s really hard to understand what e.g. δη is doing in a sentence.

  8. Hey Seamus, I see that the 101 course will be on Sundays in the evening. For 2025, will this time stay consistent? Meaning, will the 102 course that follows the 101 course also be on Sunday at that time, and then the same for the 103 and 104 courses? If so, that would make it more likely to do the whole year sequence since that time works for me and my schedule won’t change this year. Thanks!

    • That’s correct. The 101 course starting on Sunday evenings will continue on throughout the whole year on Sundays, same time, as 102 -> 103 -> 104. I generally aim to keep a cohort together and provide some timetable stability in this way.

  9. Is there any possibility of taking an additional student in the upcoming Greek 101 class?

  10. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. Very helpful – I try to start any writing I do in classical Greek with the day’s date. How would you express years? With the traditional BC/AD system?

    • Yes, I would use BC/AD (πρὸ τοῦ Χριστοῦ, μετὰ τὸν Χριστόν). Partly because that’s how we reckon years, and I’m not sure there’s a good way of revivifying ancient yearly naming practices. I suppose if one wanted to do that, you would be saying things like, “in the first year of the 2nd presidency of Trump”

      • Many thanks. Here in Britain I suppose I’d have to use the regnal year of the monarch, which doesn’t appeal much. So πρὸ/μετὰ τοῦ Χριστοῦ it shall be

  14. I’m so glad you’re getting back into podcasts! As someone who’s listened to pretty much every Ancient Greek podcast out there, Ἑλληνιζώμεθα is easily the best. I’ve gone through every episode at least three times now. The first time around, I could only catch bits and pieces, but every time I come back to it, I can follow along so much better.
    For some reason, it’s just more comprehensible than anything else, even your solo episodes. I don’t know if it’s the unscripted nature or the fact that it’s a dialogue where you have to make yourself understood in real time, but it works. It really felt like you were both just having fun with the language. I get that finding a time that works across different continents is a massive challenge, but I still wish there were 100 episodes to dive into!

  15. I’ve been listening to Ancient Greek podcasts more and more in recent months. At first the difficulty was hearing so many differences between different pronunciation methods, but I started embracing it as if I was just listening to different dialects.

    Thanks for your contribution to the space!

  16. Hear, hear! (Or is it Here, here!?) Another reason I think people sometimes resist communicative approaches to learning a language, if they’re interested in something like Ancient Greek or Latin, they will say they only want to be able to read the language, so why do they have to learn to hear or speak it? It seems to me though that I have read that being able to read proficiently depends on having oral proficiency. (I may be remembering that quite wrong, so if I have made a major error please correct me!) But if that’s true, then even if someone “only” wants to read, then it seems they also have to be able to speak, first. At least if they want to be able to read well, and not by laborious decoding.

  17. I think another thing that makes it hard is that often people don’t really care about “knowing” the language. They need to have enough ability to analyze the language to be able to inject credible demonstrations of their pastoral preparation in the form of “behind this word is the Greek word … which means …” which hungry church people eat up like sugar and often set as a defining mark as to whether their pastor is competent with the word.