[B-Greek] "Crossing the Rubicon" (learning Greek NOT in English)
Bryant J. Williams III
bjwvmw at com-pair.net
Wed Jun 20 17:00:37 EDT 2007
Dear List,
Correct URL is http://call.canil.ca/koine/Greek05.html
Rev. Bryant J. Williams III
----- Original Message -----
From: "Norbert Rennert" <norbert.rennert at sil.org>
To: "B-Greek B-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 12:36 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] "Crossing the Rubicon" (learning Greek NOT in
English)
>
> 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
>
>
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
> B-Greek mailing list
> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek
>
> For your security this Message has been checked for Viruses as a courtesy
of Com-Pair Services!
>
>
>
> --
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG Free Edition.
> Version: 7.5.472 / Virus Database: 269.9.1/857 - Release Date: 6/20/07
2:18 PM
>
>
For your security this Message has been checked for Viruses as a courtesy of Com-Pair Services!
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list