From Kansas City

Please introduce yourself here, if you haven't already.
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dwagnerkc
Posts: 1
Joined: July 29th, 2015, 2:47 pm

From Kansas City

Post by dwagnerkc »

David Wagner here. MDiv student at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. I've hovered around these boards for a while so I thought I'd finally join in. Goal #1 is site reading currently and Problem #1 is Vocab. So the many vocab discussions here have been particularly helpful.
Stephen Hughes
Posts: 3323
Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Re: From Kansas City

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Hi David
When we talk about sight reading, some people think of it as a level of attainment, others think of it as a technique.

If we think of "sight reading" as reading at a regular speed and without the use of a grammar or dictionary, and without working with a notebook and a pen, then what do we have? What constitutes "success" in that type of reading?

Some of the possibilities are:
  1. Fluent pronunciation and articulation of the words.
  2. A recognition of the players and events.
  3. The relatedness of players to events and events and players to each other. A recognition of the inter-related temporalities and relative extents of various actions within those temporalities.
  4. The theological or personal significance of what we read for or lives.
Attaining the first of those steps is not too taxing, and can be done with some success by mastering the alphabet and how letters are pronounced in various combinations. The second will come through the acquisition of vocabulary. Beginners will see a few words in a paragraph that they recognise, but perhaps little else.
The third step requires the type of knowledge that one would ordinarily expect to cover in the first two years of a a Greek course. Learning the conjugations, declensions, prepositions, pronouns and particles, and ow they go together (syntax). The fourth step comes through sight reading once we have gained fluency.

Not attaining the final step when one sets out sight reading is no reason to not do it. All through the process there is the underlying assumption that reading would be taking place. As with all learning, it happens in stos and starts, with plateaus, steep and sudden ascents, and seeming regression from time to time.

In doing an MDiv. you show that you have an educated background, so let me speak about vocabulary acquisitiion to your level of education for a moment. If you have been following for some time, you will have by now realised that my basic ideas about meaning derive both from Sassure's Sign Systems and Kierkegaard's existential experientialism. Whether or not you accept those two bases as your's too for the acquisition of vocabulary, it is very beneficial to vocabulary acquisition if you approach the task, not only with quality (well-arranged) reference works, but also with an educated theoretical framework in your thinking, in which you are expecting vocabulary acquisition to take place. Beyond the level of "techniques" to get the words into you and make them stick, there are a number of theoretical possibilities as to what you believe you are doing when you learn vocabulary. L2-L2 Acquisition allows much clearer definition and easier understanding of the structure and inter-relatedness of the sign systems at work within the language, but it is really an uphill battle. Appropriation of vocabulary knowledge by personal experience of the language, or the acquisition of vocabulary seen as a skill as much as it is a data-base of definable knowledge is much harder, but also far more rewarding, than memorisation of lists of glosses.

The numbers of words involved in "full mastery" of the New Testament vocabulary are understated. The task grows by 2 or 3 fold when you look at polysemy and factor that into the equation. The stated 6,500 words that you need to master, actually become a lot more if you count the number of meanings. That being said, mastery of derivational morphology and the ability to learn words by cognate groups really helps things a lot. At a first pass level, one meaning can be assumed for all cognates, but beyond that the details are as much about what is as they are about what is not.

Learning comes from application of one's mental faculties. I am skeptical of any technique that requires an Eastern mediation-like emptying of the mind as a means of achieving knowledge through contemplating as little as possible and expecting as much as possible. That being said, I think that the most effective way to use a lexicon or a grammar is to understand how the writer of the reference work moved from the language as recorded to the grammar. That presupposes a personal experience of and interaction with the language.

Welcome to B-Greek and good luck with your studies.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
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