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,
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
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
Language
The other day I was in a conversation and couldn’t for the life of me retrieve the Gàidhlig word for “question”. All I could think of was freagairt, which is “answer”. I had to ask what it was. It’s ceist, of course. Duh. That’s a word I
Greek
One of the downsides of training students to translate in order to understand, is that they very often develop the erroneous notion that translation is meaning. "The meaning of Greek word X is English word Y", or slightly more complex versions of the same. No, no, no. Greek
Uncategorized
This was mentioned to me by a student recently in a small group class that I am kind-of mentoring, and I think it’s worth adapting and sharing. The original idea, or at least where the student got it from, is Daniel Wallace, here. It’s the idea that
Greek
Well let's have another brief review, shall we? Mastronarde's Introduction to Attic Greek dates back to 1993, at least, and has long been in use at UC Berkeley, and elsewhere. A second edition was released in 2013, though I am only familiar with the first edition.
Books
Alright, let’s get to a textbook I really enjoy. Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latina per se Illustrata: Pars I: Familia Romana This is, without exaggeration, the best Latin textbook on the market. It’s not perfect, it’s not the be all and end all, but there’s simply
Pedagogy
Lately I’ve been reading a bit about bilingualism in children, and some academic articles relating to language shift in Gàidhlig. They caused me to also reflect a little about what the broader goals of teaching classical languages, e.g. Latin, Greek, κτλ., via communicative methods are. It’s not
Greek
(I'm mostly in the midst of doing a lot of thesis writing, but thought I could take some time out to ride a hobby horse). * Knowing a language isn't a qualification for teaching a language. We usually think that knowing something is a pre-requisite for