[B-Greek] my AREIOS POTHR arrived, short stories

Kathleen Creager kathleen.creager at comcast.net
Wed Nov 3 17:43:39 EST 2004


Anne H. Groton's From Alpha to Omega, a beginning classical Greek textbook,
includes about 20 paraphrased Aesop's fables.  Each is immediately followed
in the book by a glossary of any vocabulary that hasn't yet been introduced.
I studied first-year classical Greek on my own using Donald Mastronarde's
book, and when I was about halfway though the Mastronarde book I started
also looking at the Groton book.  The fables were fun and also very
encouraging - I didn't always feel like I was making progress in
Mastronarde,  but then when I could actually *read* the fables, (as opposed
to painstakingly deciphering them), I would know that I must be learning
something!  But that was when I read them after making my way through at
least half of a first-year textbook -- I'm not sure I would have enjoyed
them so much if I had been learning Greek from that textbook and trying  to
read the fables when I was more "at" the level they were written to.

Kathleen Creager

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "R Yochanan Bitan Buth" <ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il>
To: <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2004 3:47 PM
Subject: [B-Greek] my AREIOS POTHR arrived, short stories


> 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
>
>
>
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
> B-Greek mailing list
> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek




More information about the B-Greek mailing list