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

knpraise at comcast.net knpraise at comcast.net
Wed Jul 16 14:52:47 EDT 2008


Taking into consideration your subject line comments,  perhaps I should continue my query
in the archieves of this forum.   Wouldn't want to make anyone sick.

Pastor John Smithson (retired)
jsjohnnt at aol.com




-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu> 

> 
> 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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