[B-Greek] Learning Greek (ad nauseam and for the umpteenth time)
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Jul 16 06:32:57 EDT 2008
On Jul 16, 2008, at 1:11 AM, (John Smithson) knpraise at comcast.net wrote:
>
> Dr. Conrad, you rcently wrote:
>
>>> At any rate, I want the student being tested for understanding of
>>> the Greek text to tell me not what the WORDS of the text mean in
>>> terms of English (or other target-language) words, but what the
>>> text supposedly understood MEANS -- expressed in "otherwords" or
>>> "re-stated in one's own words." <<
>
> And you follow up with
>
>>> All of this has to do with my objection to the growing use of
>>> "interlinears" or "reverse interlinears as primary tools of what
>>> continues to be called "learning Biblical Greek <<
>
> With the above, are you saying that a correct interpretation or
> understanding of a particular text is the function of a thorough
> going grammatical/syntacitical review of that text?
>
> If that is true, what avenues of research or study are open to the
> laymen as she attempts to glean meaning from the same particular text?
>
> Thank you.
>
> I am new to the forum. I am also quite the layman when it comes to
> Greek (a retired pastor whose two years of formal Greek studies
> occured in '69-71, shortly after the earth cooled.) If my
> questions are not appropriate to this forum, please advise. I do
> enjoy the discussions.
John: I don't think we spend more time in this forum talking about
anything in the world more than pedagogy: we all want to learn Greek
or learn it better. You may have started in '69-'71, "shortly after
the earth cooled" -- I started in 1952, "still in the ice age"? (when
gasoline was 20c a gallon). We all want to learn Greek, but we range
across a very broad spectrum about how to do it.
The message from which you cited me was part of a longer thread of
messages in what seems a recurrent and ongoing discussion on this list
of the hows and the whys of learning Biblical Greek or ancient Greek
generally. The chief point I was trying to make in the above message
is that understanding an ancient Greek text is more a matter of
reading the text in question as nearly as possible in the same manner
as an ancient reader who spoke and wrote the language read it -- or in
the way that a knowledgeable speaker and writer of English reads and
understands an English text. Understanding the text is not -- not
primarily, at any rate -- a matter of grammatical and syntactical
analysis (I must say that my experience as a teacher is that no few
students can do a grammatical and syntactical analysis of a passage of
connected Greek text without really understanding it). I think that
understanding the Greek text that one is reading is a matter of
grasping directly through the written text, as it flows along, what
its author intended to communicate. So much of the analytic
"grammatical/syntactical review of a text" -- as you put it -- hinges
on taking apart the elements and structures of the discourse, focuses
on the "how" of what the discourse communicates rather than upon the
"what" that the author intended to communicate. Too much of the
procedure that is most commonly taught, I believe, is based upon the
notion that the Biblical Greek text is a cipher that has to be decoded
and reduced to its concrete number of intelligible elements that can
be converted to English or some other target language; that has been
one of the recurrent targets of my criticism -- the notion of
understanding a Biblical text as decoding and converting its elements
piecemeal into the target language.
Our archives, the oldest of them going back to 1991, are chock full of
pedagogical discussions of how to acquire and master Biblical Greek.
Just about every conceivable approach, textbook, and methodology
thought to be useful for learning Biblical Greek has been discussed at
some time, most of them many times. There's both wheat and chaff in
those archived discussions, but one has to do one's own sifting, I'm
afraid.
Here's something I wrote a few months ago in this forum that speaks, I
think, to the questions you are raising:
"(1) I don't really believe that it takes an earthquake or a
mutation to give one a real mastery of Greek; what it takes is more
intense and sustained effort on the part of one endeavoring to
achieve it. But even that effort must be methodical rather than
haphazard. I've described my own process of slogging through Homer
hour after hour, night after night, and the exhilaration upon
coming, eventually, to reading line after line of text -- not so
much effortlessly, as confidently and with understanding. I think
that one must do this slogging with each new author one tackles, to
some extent -- particularly an author with a distinctive style and a
distinctive lexical range. And, as I've said recently with regard to
use of the lexicon while reading, one needs to take pains with
lexicon entries and not just scan them quickly for the gloss that
will permit one to go on with the passage currently being read: one
needs to take pains with the recurrent words that have significant
nuances in different contexts. As for the reading itself, I remain
convinced that the more one keeps reading Greek that is unfamiliar
or less familiar, the better equipped one will be to come back and
read the GNT again.
"(2) Another key element in this problem and its solution (how to
achieve mastery of Greek), it seems to me, is the extent to which
analytical investigation of the text is primary or secondary. At the
textbook level this is a matter of (a) the traditional method of new
lessons introducing new vocabulary, new grammar items, and a few
context-less sentences or phrases illustrating the new
construction(s) and employing the new vocabulary -- vs. (b) new
lessons built around extensive texts of connected prose (or verse)
while having at hand the lexical and syntactical aids that will
assist mastery of those texts. The traditional approach focuses on
analytical skills: memorization of paradigms for declension of
nouns, pronouns, and adjectives and conjugation of verbs -- parsing
of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs -- identification of
categories and subcategories of case or tense or mood usage. I don't
say that the analytical process is worthless but that it does NOT
naturally lead to comprehension of connected prose or verse texts.
What one must aim at is thinking in Greek as one reads, not sentence-
by-sentence searching for subjects and predicates and modifiers but
reading words in the order that the Greek-speaking mind finds
"natural" and grasping the cumulative meaning in successive phrases.
The interlinears and parsed texts may occasionally be useful when
one does analytical exploration of how a passage works to
communicate its meaning, but I honestly do not believe that they
will teach one how to think in Greek. I am inclined to think that
the predominant approach in current Biblical Greek pedagogy, as
indicated by textbooks as well as by analytic tools and electronic
resources being made available to students of Biblical Greek,
focuses upon the analytical skills rather than upon reading. And
that, I think, is why so few students of Biblical Greek arrive at
the ability to READ Greek.
"An analogy might make this paradox clearer. I remember being
surprised, when first reading Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, to
find him insisting that lectures on morality are useless to those
who do not already practice good behavior, and that children learn
to behave rightly by growing up in an environment where right
behavior is practiced. It seemed to me that this was tantamount to
saying, as Jane Austen might say, that it is "good breeding" that
makes people good, that parental and peer behavior is the primary
factor in acquisition of good character -- although one knows that
the "well-bred" can behave in selfish and dishonorable ways just as
surely as those raised on the wrong side of the tracks, and Jane
Austen's novels themselves amply illustrate that truth. What
Aristotle really meant by insisting that lectures on morality are
useless to those who do not already practice good behavior is that
moral philosophy attempts to examine the "whys" of right behavior,
not the "hows." Comparably, it seems to me, the analytical approach
to learning Biblical Greek tends to focus on the "whys" of good
grammar (Why a dative with this verb? Why a subjunctive in this
construction? Why an aorist rather than a present- tense form in this
narrative sentence?) instead of the "hows" of good grammar. One
learns the "hows" of good Greek grammar (i.e. how lucid and
intelligent Greek speakers/writers express themselves in order to be
understood by intelligent Greek listeners/readers) by reading Greek
texts and/or listening to Greek speakers, NOT, in the first
analysis, by parsing the words of their sentences and explaining
the constructions of their cases, moods and tenses."
Now it well may be that what you really meant to ask was how YOU might
start again to learn the Greek you started to learn 40 years ago. If
that's the case, ask more directly. For better or worse, you will
certainly find that respondents in this forum hold strong views on the
better and worse approaches -- and there is no clear consensus. But
first, let's get clear on what it is that you do in fact want.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Ret)
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