[B-Greek] Difficulty of reading passages
Jeffrey T. Requadt
jeffreyrequadt_online at hotmail.com
Sat Jun 30 16:26:47 EDT 2007
I know that a frequent topic of discussion on this list is how best to learn
Koine Greek. I find myself generally agreeing that the more exposure one has
to a language (especially using it), the more natural it will become. Thus,
I would really like to start reading more of it without worrying too much
about getting everything right, or for the purpose of exegesis, etc., but
rather just to read it over and over and over and thus to become very
familiar with it (not unlike the point of the C.S. Lewis passage referred to
earlier on the list). So I was wondering if those of you out there more
familiar with the level of sophistication/difficulty of the New Testament
(and other easily-obtainable texts) could recommend a starting point for
reading just for the fun of it. I've tried reading James, and can make a
little headway because I already know it in English, but there is too much
vocabulary that I'm not familiar with. I've read through 3 John before; that
seems to be a fairly simple passage as the NT goes. I've heard that 1 John
is easy to read without too much trouble. My purpose again is to read lots
of text without trying to figure everything out. I remember learning to read
French by *actually reading French books* without trying to figure out every
single word and how it fit into the grammatical or syntactical structure of
the sentence, or doing discourse analysis, or literary analysis. In other
words, the purpose was to understand French by reading and speaking French.
In the same way, when I taught piano, I didn't just teach about how the
piano works, or the difference between whole steps and half steps, or how
the diatonic scale works (although you need to know these things at some
point to truly understand how to play the piano well). I focused more on
actually playing the piano. I really think that's how our brains learn most
things. We connect the theory to our own experience. I want to be able to
read the N.T. (and other early Christian literature) for understanding
without resorting to lexica all the time, and I don't care so much about
writing a technical commentary. I want to be able to connect the linguistic
theories to my own experience so that I can not only understand the "how" of
the Greek but also the Greek itself. So again, my question is, what texts
would be good to start out with, and where would I go from there? If anyone
has a "graded" list of difficulty, that would be helpful too.
Jeffrey T. Requadt
Teacher
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Dietz Elementary School
7575 E. Palma St.
Tucson, AZ 85710
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(520) 731-4000
fax (520) 731-4001
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