The great unknown in my Greek is how cases with or without prepositions change or interchange when a sentence that could be expressed with a verb is reexpressed with a noun instead and vice versa. In crude terms, it seems that a one case with a preposition can almost mean the same as another case without it. It is something that I hope to understand better later, and am sure that I don't understand well now. In fact, it would cause me to rethink my current understanding of the genitive case in an expression of an amount of money - currently I understand it as an abstract external measure rather than a tangible handful of money - if this πρός + accusative were standing in place of that with approximately the same sense, in this phrase. The outcome of my reluctance to see the direct correspondence between them, is the explanation that I have given which assumes a non-equivalence - ie makes a difference - and suits the context while being a plausible sense of πρός.Wes Wood wrote:Stephen Hughes wrote:That stuff about πρός is just straight from the dictionary.
When you say reading what do you mean? Do you eyes move at the pace of your mouth? That is not going to get you very far or at least it won't get you there quickly. Reading is a process of re-speaking the words of an authour. If you do that on a word-by-word basis you are not going to get very good phrasing. When I read, I look at the structure and then read part by part. The easiest things to notice are the conjunctions and prepositions, and I'm sure you are breaking up your reading in that way already. I usually go through a few back-flips and re-thinks about the structure as I read. One of the things that makes Xenophon so easy is that he tends to leave sentences quite straightforward.Wes Wood wrote:I know, but your perceptiveness is not. I am greatly impressed at your ability to predict where I am going to struggle. If you don't mind a diversion, I will tell you more precisely why. I recently changed the way I work through these. First, I read the text out loud three times. After the third reading, I give myself a moment to attempt to make sense of the parts I don't understand. If there are any words from the reading that I am unsure about after this, I go to the dictionary and read through the relevant entries. I then look at the text and write out my initial translation.
Realising quickly what you don't know is an interesting experience, I think. The recognition skills need time to become habituated. Think of it in terms of race. If you see a group of people of a racial group that you are not familiar with, then you will notice the similarity between them, more easily than the differences. Learning a new language is like that. You see Korean, Greek or Catalan, for example for the first time, and it all looks foreign. After some time, you can recognise what language the text is written in. That is a good and essential first step. With people, after some time your mind filters the similarity and concentrates on finding the differences. That is done in "big picture" mode. By reading word-by-word, if that is what you are doing, you are going to details too quickly. If you tried to recognise people by seeing first their eyes, then two seconds later their nose, then their cheeks. That makes recognition of the person very difficult and would make recognition of the overall appearance even more so. To make a comparision - rather than a recognition - your eyes would bounce back and forward between two people as you looked at details. You're still in your first decade as a teacher, but I'm sure by now that you would be more or less stereotyping students by now, instead of the initial emotionally draining feeling of seeing all individuals in front of you.Wes Wood wrote:This is as far as I got Wednesday before I ran out of time to work on it. Usually, I would have gone back to my resources and worked through parts that I felt would improve my understanding of the passage. I finish by looking at your hints and seeing where I can make improvements or I where need to adjust my previous understanding. I don't look at your hints before this point, because then my efforts are no longer my efforts. (I fear the observer effect.)
The effect of realising what you don't know changes over the learning process - specifically as you progress from not knowing more than you do know, to knowing more than you do know, and so on. Recognising what you don't know is based on patterns not individualities. You have expressed your understanding of this previously a few days ago in the PM I replied to, without realising that you expressed it. Those "What will the colour of the next bead be?" type exercises that we used to do are good for learning to anticipate things, and ordinarily the same skills are applied to our language learning and reading too. It is something that you could aim to be better at.
The work is not so hard, and it is what I enjoy doing. One of the steps in preparing hints (or any teaching material) is to anticipate student responses to the material, but you already know that. In the case of this reading, I am fortunate to know what words and structures readers of the New Testament are familiar with.Wes Wood wrote:Sometimes, your hints sail right above or bounce off my thick skull, but frequently, even then, they predict where I have or am still struggling. Still, I wanted to acknowledge your hard work Wednesday. So, I read the hints anyway and let you know that I had not yet been able to interact with them. Unfortunately, I spent so much time looking at the optative on Thursday that I did not have time to look at the entry for πολεῖν either, though I knew both days that doing so would make that stretch of text more clear.