[B-Greek] Learning Greek (ad nauseam and for the umpteenth time)
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Jul 16 15:52:41 EDT 2008
On Jul 16, 2008, at 2:52 PM, knpraise at comcast.net wrote:
> 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.
No, no, no -- that's my line! I tend to put adverbs like these in the
subject-header whenever I find myself responding to a new query with
thoughts that I have already expressed repeatedly hitherto. A Google
advanced search of the archives shows that the phrase appears in 73
messages, most of them originating wtih me (some directed at me).
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Ret)
>
> -------------- 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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