teaching top down

Suedaleg at aol.com Suedaleg at aol.com
Thu May 4 02:13:04 EDT 2000


I have been folowing this line with some interest.  My intention in 
strengthening my grasp of Greek in the last few years has been an attempt at 
deepening my relationship with my God by trying to understand better those 
who wrote for him.
I have tried to learn Hebrew also with only modest success. (I can recognise 
the words but some of the forms really get beyond me.)  So I have been trying 
to become more fluent.  From this line I have realized that my desire is to 
begin thinking with the author in his language.  I am learning to get away 
from some of the stiff translation which the "morphology" study results in 
and to take the larger sections as whole units.  Is it possible for a person 
trained in the "bottom up" approach to learn to reverse the direction? I hope 
so.  I see the need to do the word and form study as well, but I want to be 
able to move beyond.

I will probably take two approaces to the NT, in the way that I speak two 
different forms of English,  one for story telling, somewhat informal, 
perhaps coloquial (sp?) where the form realy does not matter near as much as 
the action or process; and a more formal, precise form used for teaching 
ideas in which I stick very close to "correct" grammatical structure because 
it has sreious meaning.

I can see the need for two approaches to the Greek, one for naration where 
the purpose is to show the action, and one for the "thesis" where the meaning 
of the teaching is what is important.

Thanks for encouraging my thoughts here.

Dale Greenlee



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