[B-Greek] my AREIOS POTHR arrived, short stories
R Yochanan Bitan Buth
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Wed Nov 3 15:47:05 EST 2004
EGRAPSEN Norbert
>On the recent topic of Harry Potter in greek, does anyone know of short
stories that have been created to teach Greek for beginners?>
that is the trick, of course. "Easy and short" is a good formula, yet that
usually requires about ten times more material than people anticipate. I've
mentioned WHD Rouse's A Greek Boy at Home on more than one occasion. It has
little snippets, episodes, though even that needs support with the
vocabulary. Live Greek explanation and TPR in class can go a long way
towards making such things doable.
One can paraphrase Aesop's fables and build students towards reading the
originals after lots of paraphrases. I wouldn't worry about grammatical
completeness and conciseness. The is the good news from Krashen's language
theories. Natural language is recursive enough to properly fill in what is
needed. Simple, well told stories will have ample examples that can be
extracted and summarized for the student at the appropriate time.
Concentrate on 'understandable and simple' and you will have the necessary
grammar.
And tying in another comment on this thread, I think that the Narnia tales
would make excellent ancient Greek reading, especially if purposefully told
to persons with an assumed vocab of say 1000 words (from common life, rather
than strictly theological/NT vocab), i.e., as if to immigrants or small
ancient Greek children. All we need is the donor to put up the tens of
thousands of dollars necessary for such a project.
Blessings
Randall Buth
Randall Buth, PhD
Director, Biblical Language Center
www.biblicalulpan.org
and Director, Biblical Studies in Israel
Hebrew University, Rothberg International School
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
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