[B-Greek] Rife: A Beginning Greek Book
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Sep 29 06:13:02 EDT 2004
At 8:53 AM +0200 9/29/04, Wieland Willker wrote:
>I came across this book in a book listing:
>
>A Beginning Greek Book
>Based on the Gospel according to Mark
>John M. Rife
>ISBN: 1-59244-703-1
>$20.80 242 pages
>Publisher: Wipf & Stock Publishers; (May 2004)
>
>Perhaps someone knows more about it?
Yes, and I am astounded that it is still on the market, especially as it
doesn't seem to be a new edition; I began to learn Greek using this
textbook at Tulane University in September 1952; it is a bad memory with
respect to the text, a splendid memory with respect to my teacher, who
wanted to use the gospel of Mark as a starting point for an inductive
learning approach and who made it possible for our little class to learn
Greek in spite of the wretched textbook. I don't remember much of detail
about the book, only that it seemed to explain very little at all and very
poorly what little it did explain. It's conceivable that the book has been
revised and that my memory does it an injustice, but when, with the same
teacher and mostly the same class, we went on to read Homer in the second
year with Benner's already aging (and still available) classic _Selection's
from Homer's Iliad---as awkward as that transition may have been, the
experience was much like that described by Keats in his ode "On first
looking into Chapman's Homer." So my enduring memory of Rife's textbook
from over 50 years ago is (a) a headache, and (b) astonishment with how a
good teacher can work around the snags of a wretched textbook. If anyone
has positive things to say about this book, he or she really should come
forward in its defense; I personally don't remember details about the book
(I added many Greek primers to my library over the years but got rid of
Rife early on) so much as the lasting impression it made upon me.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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