[B-Greek] "Crossing the Rubicon" (learning Greek NOT in English)

Norbert Rennert norbert.rennert at sil.org
Wed Jun 20 15:36:51 EDT 2007


I would like to approach this topic from the perspective of a beginning 
Greek learner. What is the best way to get a person to start to think in 
Greek without having to constantly parse and translate into English? I 
was taught this way and I must say that I did not enjoy it, nor was it 
particularly successful. What I think is missing in teaching Greek is 
enough beginner level text material that a student can spend time 
reading and re-reading until it is thoroughly understood without him 
having to stop at every word and parse it.
I have developed a proof-of-concept website 
<http://call.canil.ca/koine/Greek05.html>which allows a simple Greek 
story to be manipulated into many different variations. This method 
takes a frame concept (I see the man. You see the man. ...) which 
usually is applied to isolated sentences and applies it to whole 
stories. There are numerous advantages to this. The student reads the 
original story and learns the vocabulary first. To help with that, I 
have mouse-over tooltips with translations of the Greek. The story line 
is simple and the nouns are all from a single declension class. This 
reduces the complexity of the morphology and confronts the student 
repeatedly with noun endings from the same class. All 4 or 5 cases 
should be used in each story so the student encounters the whole 
paradigm. Once the original story has been studied and the vocabulary 
and story understood, the student can begin manipulating the story. You 
can change the person (1,2,3), gender, plurality, and whether to use 
pronouns for both the main actor and the secondary actor. Each time you 
make a change the story gets re-written with the changes you selected 
producing, in effect, a new story. However, many things still stay the 
same, most importantly, the semantics of the story. This means that when 
the student reads a 'new' story, he already knows the semantics of the 
story plot and so can understand any new morphological forms without 
having had to memorize them first. Thus the meaning of the story is in 
the forefront of the student activity not parsing and memorizing 
paradigms. This gives the student lots of reading practise with 
appropriate level text. The script I use to tag my stories does not 
change the syntax, except for adding a plural actor when selected. This 
means that an author can write really simple stories or more advanced 
level material. My goal is to add more simple stories from as many of 
the paradigms as possible. The advantages for a Greek curriculum is that 
each story that is written can be changed into many other stories, all 
at the same difficulty level, but each teaching another aspect of 
grammar, vocabulary etc. All the while the student is reading lots of 
Greek that is easy to understand. Another idea would be to have an audio 
file of the story so that the student can learn to pronounce the story 
in a fluent manner with proper intonation, phrasing, etc.
What do you think about such an approach to helping a student begin 
internalizing Greek?

Norbert Rennert

------------------------------------------------------------------------

NORBERT RENNERT
Information Technician
Canada Institute of Linguistics
7600 Glover Road, Langley, BC V2Y 1Y1
t: 604.513.2129 ext. 3956
f: 604.513.2128





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