[B-Greek] "Crossing the Rubicon" (learning Greek NOT in English)
Jonathan Robie
jwrobie at mindspring.com
Tue Jun 19 15:59:57 EDT 2007
I really like this, but it also points indirectly to a difficulty:
> The very
> formula, "Naus means a ship," is wrong. Naus and ship both mean a
> thing, they do not mean one another. Behind Naus, as behind navis or
> naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender mass with sail or
> oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding.
Ah, but what should we picture for DE, hOTI, hOU hEINEKEN (no, please
don't picture a Dutch beer!), or for various grammatical features?
It's pretty easy for me to think in a foreign language with respect to
concrete nouns and verbs. It's much harder to do so with respect to all
these subtle things that constitute the greatest real differences among
languages. And these are harder to convey with some of the language
experience approaches. What pictures would RosettaStone use to convey
the meaning of MEN ... DE?
At my current level of Greek, it's easy to stop thinking of nouns and
verbs in English, but all these rich little words, tense and aspect, and
the like really matter, and I find that I often use English or German
equivalents as a reminder of their meaning.
Jonathan
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list