Language - The Patrologist

Greek

Some teaching reflections from 2020

This year I’ve taught more Greek than ever before, and more in ways that reflect my own pedagogical commitments. And so here’s some reflections on teaching Greek and Latin from my experience with The Patrologist courses, aka SeumasU Athenaze I decided to whole-heartedly adopt Athenaze as a

Greek

Biblingo, a review

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

Uncategorized

The Borg Cube analogy for language learning, complete with spiders

I often find myself coming up with analogies and illustrations that help students understand not only how a particular piece of language works, but how languages, and language learning, works as a whole. Here's one that I think is good, but a little bit odd. Think of your

Greek

Same conversation, same text - a technique

One of the things I have been reflecting on recently, both in reading a fair bit, but also working on the composition of LGPSI, is how useful it is, and would be, to take the WAYK concept of “same conversation” and apply it at the text level. Same conversation is

Greek

Reading... sideways?

One of the things I've become increasingly aware of as a strategy for developing greater comprehension and fluency, is what I've taken to calling 'reading sideways'. In particular, this has crystallised for me lately while reflecting on my reading through the Lingua Latina Per

Greek

Re-conceiving the middle voice for Greek and Latin students (VI)

Well, I hope by this point, I’ve done a few things: 1. Convinced you that Greek has an active v. middle voice system, in which the middle domain covers a range of different categories, all generally united by ‘subject affectedness’ 2. Convinced you that ‘deponency’ is not a useful

Greek

Re-conceiving the middle voice for Greek and Latin students (V)

So, about Latin then All through this series (one, two, three, four) I’ve been careful to include Latin examples of the various semantic categories covered. That’s because I’ve often wondered about Latin – does it really have deponent verbs? The answer is, it’s complicated. It’s complicated

Language

So, you want to log hours of language activity

How can you practically do this? How will I be doing this? This is a follow-on post from this one. Firstly, let me address an issue raised by my wife, which is comparing my Latin experience with Mongolian is apples and oranges. Because time spent in Mongolia was overwhelmingly

Greek

Re-conceiving the middle voice for Greek and Latin students (IV)

We’ve spoken so far about a range of various 'middle-domain' events and actions, and in this post I focus in on our final group, related to Spontaneous Processes and Passive-Middles (See posts one, two, and three to get up to speed. All this work derives

Language

Logging hours in a language, not 'years'

How many years have you been studying Greek? 18 years. Which is useless information. One of the things that has lodged deep in my brain from listening to Bill VanPatten et al., is that measuring 'years' is not actually very useful. And here's a simple comparison.

Greek

Re-conceiving the middle voice for Greek and Latin students (III)

We’ve spoken so far about direct reflexives, and grooming actions, and three categories of body-action middles, including changes in body posture, non-translational motion, and translational motion. (See posts one and two to get up to speed. All this work derives primarily from Suzanne Kemmer and Rutger Allan,

Greek

Re-conceiving the middle voice for Greek and Latin students (II)

In today’s post, following on from the last, I’m going to walk through some initial semantic categories which Kemmer presents as mostly or typically used for middle-type situations. I had hoped to get through more categories, but it seems that will need a couple more posts. I’