Dobson - Learn NT Greek
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Jun 11 05:46:55 EDT 2002
At 9:43 PM -0800 6/10/02, Chuck Tripp wrote:
>I used Dobson's book at the beginning. Originally, I had borrowed a copy of
>another book (Machen I think), returned it and bought Dobson. The price was
>good for getting my feet wet. It was an okay a beginner's book but I don't
>feel that it took me very far.
>
>Eventually, I came across "Greek, An Intensive Course" by Hardy Hansen and
>Gerald M. Quinn, which is, I guess, a more traditional book dealing with
>Attic Greek.
>
>I wound up giving Dobson away. I think what frustrated me is that it was so
>inductive that at times it seemed you'd learn what the 2nd person singular
>of active aorist indicative (it would not say that of course) and have to
>wait two whole chapters til you found out what the 3rd person was. Hansen
>and Quinn on the other hand was great, well organized with tables, and great
>exercises that really reinforced what you were learning. To Hansen and
>Quinn's discredit however, you had to wait till chapter 15 (of 20) before
>you learned EIMI or even the personal pronouns (EGW, SU, etc). Having
>first read Dobson, I was able to handle concepts in my personal reading long
>before I got to them in Hansen and Quinn.
>
>Dobson on the one hand and and Hansen and Quinn on the other have very
>different ways of teaching verbs. Dobson tries to teach patterns for
>example for the verbs. Reduplication of initial consonant for perfect, S
>followed by A for the end of verb stems for aorist, S before the ending for
>future, sometimes a different stem with imperfect endings for 2nd aorist,
>things like that. Hansen and Quinn makes absolutely no attempt to teach the
>study to recognize such patterns, rather the student must learn the six
>principal parts of each and every verb he learns and must know how they
>convert to the various usages. As much as I like Hansen and Quinn, I
>instinctively fall back what Dobson taught. It seems silly to learn the
>principal parts by rote when I can learn general patterns and be right maybe
>80% of the time.
I found Chuck's comments on Hansen & Quinn interesting; although I've never
used the text and have referred to it rarely when textbook queries come up,
I would commend it as being a very thorough textbook for classical Attic; I
would not recommend it for self-teaching, but with a good teacher or
someone to consult when questions arise, I think it may be the very best of
the more traditional kinds of textbooks for classical Attic. It was written
to be used in the very successful 8-week intensive courses taught in the
summer every year at UC-Berkeley and CUNY--course that have gotten students
directly into reading Plato and Sophocles after the
eight-week/six-hours-a-day intensive and grilling coursework. I say "the
best of the more traditional kinds of textbooks" meaning that it uses
sentences for practice of new grammar, whereas I really prefer practice
with connected narrative such as characterizes JACT _Reading Greek_ and
OUP's _Athenaze_ (both classical Attic Greek).
As for Chuck's final paragraph, I would agree that if one learns the
morphoparadigms for regular verbs, one need not learn the principal parts,
since they are all predictable from the 1st-person-sg. pres. indicative (or
"lexical form"), but one MUST memorize the principal parts of the 50-60
(fewer for NT Koine) IRREGULAR verbs which are not fully predictable.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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