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I'm not, generally, a big fan of the word 'fluency'. It doesn't do what people want it to do. On the one hand, 'fluency' as meaning something like, 'an ability to communicate at speed with accuracy' is almost never what
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[1] My promise was a lie, I confess, that I would be with you and join in the philosophical life, when I was yet in Athens, and a promise born out of our friendship and unity there; for, I have no appropriate word for this. [2] I lied, but not
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Spend any time at all looking into Greek pronunciation and you will inevitably encounter the 'pronunciation wars'. People have very heated opinions about how Greek should be pronounced. This ranges from virulent comments that because Greek is still Greek, modern Greek is the only way to pronounce it
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I've written plenty about how I don't think translation is a very useful task for language learners. However, lately I've been having great fun in the sport of translation Greek to Latin and Latin to Greek. I thought I'd write a little
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I thought I'd take the time to just talk about things I've been reading. Especially since it's been a couple of weeks: sickness, end of semester marking, general adjunct fatigue. Anyway, here's things I've read or am reading, over the
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Introduction When I first undertook theological studies, which for us involved both Greek and Hebrew, an older scholar proclaimed to us with sage wisdom that learners should eschew electronic resources until they were rather advanced, instead proceeding with printed texts, and looking up words and structures in printed lexica and
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In January of 2018, so over a year ago, I signed up to Discord, an app basically designed for gamers to provide voice-chat, but with text-chat channels as well, and adopted and adapted to various other purposes. Here's the brief story of how it changed my
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I'll be back to regular old blogging about classical language pedagogy and other things later this week. If you're after specific things you can do to help me, feeling perhaps some sympathy after last week's katharsis, here's five: 1. You can directly
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This is a follow-up and personal lament to the book review from earlier this week. I submitted my PhD dissertation in late 2016, and received my pass in March 2017. I graduated in September of that year, and it’s now 2019. I had already begun to realise how
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Since we’re on a bit of a “let’s talk about grammar” roll at the moment, here are some more thoughts on the vexed problem of when to teach some grammar. But first, what is grammar? In my view, when we are talking about Latin and Greek in particular,
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Last week I wrote about how I did plenty of grammar-translation, and I don’t believe that it leads to acquisition. This often surprises people. Let me explain why it’s surprising: Firstly, for those of us who did G-T and did a lot of it, and ended
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Download NTGreekSequencing.mp3 Here's the audio, and slideshow, for a presentation I did late last week, which will be of interest to some of you. Powerpoint Audio