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Reading in 3s is a way to structure reading a text so that you cover it 3 times over, sequentially. This is easiest explained by a 3-page model: you read 3 pages, but you only move your bookmark forward one page each session. Thus, you're always reading
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If we take the figure of 98% vocabulary coverage as what is needed to read a text at a comprehensible and 'fluent' level, so that the unknown 2% is understandable by context or not significant enough to frustrate understanding, then for the New Testament corpus, that requires learning
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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&
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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'
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I suspect that one of the outcomes of current development of tertiary online education models, at least in the models I’m most familiar with (which is a few), will be an entrenchment of a divide between permanent faculty and the continued subsistence of an academic underclass of adjuncts. I
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One of my projects for 2018 is to take a text and shepherd it, or curate it, all the way through an open source pipeline from 'print' to 'digital edition'. This is part of my 2018 year of digital humanities. Here I talk a little bit
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A question I was asked recently on twitter. Yes, but it depends what you mean by ‘immersion’ and what you think the goal is. I don’t normally use the term ‘immersion’, because that normally, strictly, pertains to a method that involves full-time immersion in a language, so all