[B-Greek] Learning Greek (ad nauseam and for the umpteenth time)

George F Somsel gfsomsel at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 16 07:12:00 EDT 2008


I would like to add my voice to Carl's in emphasizing that it is necessary to put in the long hours and the hard work in order to learn Greek.  I remember frequently not getting to bed until 3:00 am because I was poring through Smyth and trying to figure out the "why" of various constructions.  It is not enough to produce a "literal" translation.  What we need is not Greeklish but rather English which shows that the text has been understood.  I do favor being as literal as possible, but not at the expense of being incomprehensible in English.  If the reader scratches his head and say "What the $#%% is he trying to say?", you havn't understood the text yourself.
Concluding non-Greek postscript:
In keeping with Aristotle's comments on morals, the lesson is "Parents, don't let your children grow up to be bad boys."  That seems to be the problem today -- a lack of proper parenting.

 george
gfsomsel


… search for truth, hear truth, 
learn truth, love truth, speak the truth, hold the truth, 
defend the truth till death.


- Jan Hus
_________



----- Original Message ----
From: Carl W. Conrad <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu>
To: knpraise at comcast.net
Cc: B-Greek B-Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 6:32:57 AM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Learning Greek (ad nauseam and for the umpteenth time)


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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