[B-Greek] Fwd: Porter Beginning Greek Book
Louis Sorenson
llsorenson at hotmail.com
Sun Aug 2 22:04:01 EDT 2009
Elizabeth Kline wrote....
EK: >>>I think there are more options than SLA and grammar-translate.
LS: What are they? Can you give examples of text-books that you think support these methods? I think it's important all know which books line up with certain pedagogical approaches or at least depart from the standard.
EK:>>>Regardless of how you start out in beginning greek, you will at some time need to be able to do grammatical analysis, otherwise you will not be able to interact with 2000 years of exegetical tradition.
LS: A six week course using one of the standard
exegesis manuals could easily fill the gap. Buth's approach talks about
cases, tenses, etc.; (I'm currently going through his grammars).
Exegesis is overrated, imohp. (I had 8 years of exegesis/diagraming in college, graduate school and seminary along with six years of diagramming sentences in High School and excelled at it.) It's what lawyers do when they find a clause they want to interpret another way. It has taken the place of being fluent i.e., "Even though I don't know Greek very well, I can exegete this passage and tell you what it means." My big problem with exegesis is the same as using etymologies to explain what a passage means - it takes things out of context (I know that's not what the intent is). I am much more sympathetic to modern discourse analysis (from what I know of it).
In my opinion, the writers of the NT had no intention they were writing 'Legal Documents' which would be ripped apart word by word, case by case, looking for some hidden meaning or some flag that which will lead one to either justify their position on a subject or interpret the information another way. The writers of the NT used all kinds of interpretive methodologies on the texts they quoted from and used as arguments, either supportive or dissuasive. No one today wants to take the same liberties they used with their texts and so we write them off as having 'special license' and being 'special users'.
EK:>>>SLA might put off the pain of learning analysis to a later date, but you will just pay the bill next year or five years later. Frankly, my current experience tells me that students who "learned" a modern language using SLA have more trouble learning an ancient language than students who learned English grammar using something like Charles Fries. Regardless of how you start out in beginning greek, you will at some time need to be able to do grammatical analysis, otherwise you will not be able to interact with 2000 years of exegetical tradition. SLA might put off the pain of learning analysis to a later date, but you will just pay the bill next year or five years later.
LS; Perhaps it's because we teach ancient language from a non SLA method? (SLA is not my field and I'm not familiar with Fries).
Louis Sorenson
Elizabeth Kline
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