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A Graded Reader keyed to Duff's Grammar

Posted: November 23rd, 2017, 6:56 am
by daveburt
Introducing A Graded Reader for Duff's Elements [docx]

It lists all the verses in the SBL GNT which are readable without help after completing each chapter of Jeremy Duff's Elements of New Testament Greek. It's 103 A5 pages; from memory I think it's about 15% of the verses in the NT.

Duff is the Greek textbook we follow at Ridley Melbourne where I am studying, and I'm a software developer with an interest in growing my Greek and helping others learn. So I wrote a graded reader keyed to Duff to supplement the exercises with chunks of the Bible that students should be able to read without extra help.

The document includes a summary chart of how many verses you can read after each chapter, and a confusing graphic in the appendix showing how far through Duff you have to read to understand each word in the SBL GNT. There's another appendix showing the few morphs which occur in the NT but which Duff doesn't introduce.

The source code is available on Github: dburt/duff_graded_gnt. I built it using MorphGNT/SBLGNT by James Tauber, a Duff vocab list by Paul Denisowski, and I wrote a set of 25 regular expressions that describe the MorphGNT codes each chapter of Duff unlocks.

I have delayed posting it on the forum because I'm actively developing something from it which I think are far more exciting: a Duolingo-like, English-Greek and Greek-English quiz with Greek audio. You specify which chapter you've up to, then it gives you verses in both directions, allows you to type a response and compare the answer. It is currently very rough but works on the command line or in browsers with the web speech synthesis API and a Greek voice, but I haven't set up a public demo. I want to get the web speech working properly (ideally client-side so it can work offline; server-side code just needs caching) and a stylesheet, and then add spaced repetition.

Other things I'd like to add to the reader, mainly to try to get more content readable earlier:
  • divide into sentences rather than clauses
  • LXX
  • verses whose only non-readable words are proper nouns
Any kind of feedback welcome: questions, suggestions, pull requests.

Re: A Graded Reader keyed to Duff's Grammar

Posted: November 27th, 2017, 9:06 pm
by Jonathan Robie
This kind of duolingo-type software is very much needed. I would love to give you feedback when you have a chance to share.

Re: A Graded Reader keyed to Duff's Grammar

Posted: November 28th, 2017, 12:28 am
by daveburt
Thanks, I look forward to that, hopefully not too far off.

Meanwhile, Duff does do pretty well at getting students reading the GNT quickly, but I wonder if there is a better order for learning available, something like James Tauber has been talking about in his BibleTech talks (I'm thinking of part of the 2010 talk involving the 'new kind of graded reader' and the morph orderings discussed in it).

Re: A Graded Reader keyed to Duff's Grammar

Posted: November 28th, 2017, 8:28 am
by Jonathan Robie
daveburt wrote: November 28th, 2017, 12:28 am Thanks, I look forward to that, hopefully not too far off.

Meanwhile, Duff does do pretty well at getting students reading the GNT quickly, but I wonder if there is a better order for learning available, something like James Tauber has been talking about in his BibleTech talks (I'm thinking of part of the 2010 talk involving the 'new kind of graded reader' and the morph orderings discussed in it).
A graded reader is really helpful, I think you also need some kind of ongoing teaching of the grammar. Michael Palmer and I do that using scaffolding techniques that teach some part of the language with each part of the text.

Re: A Graded Reader keyed to Duff's Grammar

Posted: December 4th, 2017, 8:33 pm
by daveburt
I've put the very rough demo up at http://duff-graded-gnt.herokuapp.com/. The client-side speech synthesis only works if you've got a Greek speech synthesizer in your browser. For me it works on Firefox and Chrome on my Mac but not on my Windows machine.

Re: A Graded Reader keyed to Duff's Grammar

Posted: February 26th, 2020, 8:14 am
by Susan Griffith
New to the board. Just saw this. I'm teach NT Greek using Duff. I am really happy to see your Graded Reader. However, it looks like it's not unicode font as when downloaded, I get half random symbols. Is there a way to upload a PDF? Thanks!

Re: A Graded Reader keyed to Duff's Grammar

Posted: February 26th, 2020, 12:57 pm
by Barry Hofstetter
GreekOx wrote: February 26th, 2020, 8:14 am New to the board. Just saw this. I'm teach NT Greek using Duff. I am really happy to see your Graded Reader. However, it looks like it's not unicode font as when downloaded, I get half random symbols. Is there a way to upload a PDF? Thanks!
Welcome to B-Greek. Please notify a moderator so that we can change your screen name to match your real name, per B-Greek policy.

Re: A Graded Reader keyed to Duff's Grammar

Posted: February 26th, 2020, 11:50 pm
by daveburt
GreekOx wrote: February 26th, 2020, 8:14 am New to the board. Just saw this. I'm teach NT Greek using Duff. I am really happy to see your Graded Reader. However, it looks like it's not unicode font as when downloaded, I get half random symbols. Is there a way to upload a PDF? Thanks!
It's definitely a Unicode document, but it does include some text-critical characters with less font support. A PDF might not fix the issue.

Could you please upload a screenshot of the problem you're seeing to help me diagnose the problem more precisely?

Re: A Graded Reader keyed to Duff's Grammar

Posted: February 28th, 2020, 12:44 pm
by Susan Griffith
Thanks! Anything with a diacritical mark is just a box.

I've taken a screen shot, but not sure how to upload it to my comment. ??

Re: A Graded Reader keyed to Duff's Grammar

Posted: February 28th, 2020, 12:46 pm
by Susan Griffith
Sorry, Barry! I am so used to creating non-name screen names and didn't see anything about using real names. I don't mind, but just automatically didn't use my real name. How do I contact someone to change my account?? Thanks.