[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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