The great constraint with Koine Greek as opposed to something like modern Spanish is that you are working with a "fixed" language. As a modern I can dive into Spanish and apply all of my modern mindset and vocabulary and world view etc. in becoming a real practitioner of that language. I can "vocalize" as it were myself and my world view and my typical experiences/thoughts in Spanish. Moreover, I can continuously test my development against "native" practitioners of Spanish, and I can access the language from innumerable real life settings - pizza parlors to university classrooms.John Wright wrote: Anyway, but when I think about the break between me and a few others and the main current in the teaching of that other language, I realize that the goals are different -- I think a positive and reasonable goal for reading / writing is to be able to read and write well, as an educated 'native', and that a positive and reasonable goal for speaking is to speak well and intelligibly, and to understand a wide variety of kinds of speech. Many people involved in teaching this are just not interested in those goals.
In Koine Greek, I am really confined to "play acting" in my efforts to express myself in that language. If I introduce my world view, modern vocabulary, normal 21st century life experience, into the Koine language than I am in danger, as Jonathan Robie has noted a few times, of creating a kind of "pidgin" Koine Greek. I have seen that happening in some quarters. I am no longer dealing with the ancient language as it existed two millennia ago. And once again, not only am I hampered by a language that doesn't easily 'fit' my world; I am also unable to interact with native speakers of that language which is a huge limitation. This, I believe, puts a big constraint on how far one can go in using living language methods to learn Koine Greek. The methods are powerful and useful there. I can attest to that personally and as a teacher. But they cannot compare with the same methods applied to learning a living modern language.