[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



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