Sentences in Greek, possibles
Eric S. Weiss
eweiss at gte.net
Thu Aug 8 10:47:32 EDT 2002
Possibly off the subject of B-Greek a bit, but as one who tries, in my
spare time, to improve my Greek (I don't have the luxury of devoting hours
a week to it, as my job and commute consume 12 hours a day, 5 days a
week), I am always seeking ways that help me.
Randall Buth's efforts to immerse people in Koine as a "living" language
(even if they only learn from a pool of 1% of the language, per Mark's
claim) can only be a step in the right direction, and I intend soon to
order some of his materials (as well as the Hebrew ones, too) (I cannot
afford the time and $$ to actually GO to Jerusalem for several weeks) to
help me. As I've mentioned on this list, if our church has me teach a
1st-year Greek class next Spring (after the "Greek Tools for non-Greek
students" class I teach beginning next month is over with -- and from
which I hope to gather prospective students), I am still seriously
thinking of using John Dobson's book LEARN NEW TESTAMENT GREEK because it,
more than the others I looked at, uses a simple immersive/inductive
approach to learning the language through exposure and repetition, not
primarily paradigm and vocabulary memorization. If it doesn't work as well
as the book promises (i.e., if at the end of the course, they cannot read
a significant part of the Greek NT with some understanding), then I'll
spend some weeks having them memorize the paradigms. We'll see.
I read a study a couple years ago that showed that the part of the brain
involved in learning a second language in, e.g., junior high school or
adulthood, is NOT the same part of the brain that is used when one is
learning as an infant/child one's "native" language. Thus, Mark's claim
that one can NEVER truly think in one's second language (unless one
simultaneously as a young child learned, e.g., Spanish and English -- very
likely here in Texas for many people) may be scientifically valid. I have
a friend from Denmark whose English and ability to speak and converse in
it equals or surpasses that of most people here I know. I've never asked
her if she "thinks" in Danish and then converts it to English, but her
fluency, pronunciation, rate of speech, ability to engage in conversation,
etc., would never cause anyone to think that her native language was
something other than English.
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