Stephen Hughes wrote:Jonathan Robie wrote:He's a bit of an iconoclast, isn't he! He suggests that 2 years of modern Greek, followed by 1 year of ancient Greek, is much more effective than years of ancient Greek.
He also recommends reading the text in a language you understand, in a particular way:
Using Bilingual books is not cheating. It is one of the most powerful language learning tools we have available. The key is to use the properly.
1. Read the translation of whatever section you are working on.
2. Read the Greek, using the translation as a crutch to help you understand the Greek.
3. Reread the Greek, using the translation only when you forget a word or construction. The translation becomes an instant dictionary keyed to your text.
4. Reread the Greek until you can read the entire book without looking at the translation at all. IF you want to read at a normal pace, you have to push your eye to read at that pace.
After you have gone through this process of mastery with repeated readings of a handful of readers and bilingual texts, you will be able to take down a text and read it comfortably without any help.
Some of the most successful of my classmates in the Classical Greek reading classes I took approached Greek in this "sense before language" way. In a system where understanding the meaning is more important than understanding the language, it is great. If students are tested on their real understanding of the language, either by composition, an oral test or by a series of "why?" questions, that method of "mastery" breaks down.
This may depend on more than one thing. This year, I realized that two of my students were reading the text in English before class, and these two students are doing very well.
The class is conducted largely by asking specific questions in Greek, with students answering in Greek. I don't think that preparing this way teaches them what we learn in class, but it gives them a lot of background that helps them answer questions about texts that might be much harder for them without this preparation, and the process of answering these questions then teaches them the parts of the language they would otherwise miss.
In my own learning, I am finding that writing in Greek in response to a text really helps me.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/