[B-Greek] Immersive environments - mmorpg (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game)
Mark Lightman
lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sun Aug 9 09:47:01 EDT 2009
Hi Kevin,
You wrote:
<The problem is that to be effective you need correct examples,
or at least someone who can correct mistakes. A conversation
between learners will contain mistakes, and unless they are
corrected they will be reinforced. In real life, you learn in a
situation where most of the people around you are fluent
speakers, so you have those models of correct speech.
Even if no one actually corrects you, sooner or later you
notice that everyone else is doing something different to you.
In a classroom, you have the teacher who can correct mistakes.
A problem that is encountered in many environments on the web
is that enthusiastic learners set up an environment to interact
and learn, but it fails after a while because they cannot find
sufficient numbers of native speakers, or good second-language
speakers, who can provide the examples and correct the mistakes.
I have also seen these ventures ruined by one or two people who
insist on having their own 'standard' imposed on everyone el
se, leading to both native speakers and learners avoiding them.
While I would like to say that would not happen with learners
of Koine Greek, the sometimes heated discussions of pronunciation
schemes (among other things) on here makes me reluctant to make
such a pronouncement. The technical environment may prove much
easier to manage than the human environment.>
You raise some good points here, but our limited experience so
far with the Dialogos-e-mailing-in-Greek-forum is that when writing
and reading each others Greek, mistakes are (1) no big deal, really,
and (2) helpful in the learning process. (3) may not even be a
term germane to this type of forum, the issues being so complicated.
I think making mistakes is on a certain level a
good thing. It teaches you so much about the process of Greek. I find that
when I write Koine I sometimes catch myself using the indicative where I
should use the optative, or using an aorist where maybe a progressive would
be more precise. Sometimes I correct these "mistakes" and sometimes I
don't. Sometimes it feels WRONG to go out of your way to write "proper"
Greek when the goal is to be understood. Even with morphology and
spelling. Sometimes a mistake I might make, let's say POLON for
POLU, is actually what the form became in Modern Greek, or even, in
this case, in Modern Greek AND Homeric Greek but not in Attic/Koine.
So, is it really a mistake? Language becomes simplified. Again, if I
forget, or don't bother with a rough breathing on hOTI, am I making a mistake
or am I writing the word as it is found in MG and I think in Sappho, who also
does not use rough breathings? Even more basically, people on Dialogos
confuse the nominative and accusative quite often, but you can always understand
what they mean, and that distinction itself is lost in Greek in certain nouns.
Most of the mistakes I make I think I catch after I send the e-mail. I
could probably cut down on them if I did more editing, but the goal is to
get the message out. After all, I make mistakes in English all the time, why
can't I or anyone else on Dialogos be a bad Greek writer?
I think I used the word GRAFEUS one time,
to mean "writer." I actually was not sure if it was a word or not. I looked
it up in L.S.J. after I sent the e-mail and I think it actually means "painter."
But my e-mail was understood, so is it a mistake?
I even think there is an advantage in reading bad Greek (like mine, for example.)
The Greek we normally read has been edited and worked over and corrected so
much that it is really unrealistically perfect. That's why its hard to read the
papyri, or some of the manuscripts, which are full of the kind of errors that I
make. When I read the less than perfect Greek of Dialogos, the irony
is that maybe for the first time in my life I am reading REAL Greek,
written by a real person for
simple communication. It is a skill worth having. Also, I think that when
they teach English spelling and grammar, they sometimes have students
read stuff WITH mistakes, to see if they can spot them. I provide this
service free of charge to all who dare to read my Greek!
And anyway, if we wanted to on Dialogos or any other Greek
forum, we COULD correct each others "mistakes." This would
in my opinion get tedious and lead to the other problem you
raise, getting too fussy about our standards for "proper" Greek,
but we could do it easily enough if we wanted to.
My experience with Dialogos so far is that is has been fun, whether
really helpful in improving reading "internalization" or not. The
real drawback is the time involved in Living Language Methods.
Writing or listening with comprehension to Greek takes a long time,
time that could be spent reading. Speaking Koine, since it involves
the social logistics of getting people together, would take even longer.
Living Language Method proponents
say that in the long run the time invested will pay off. Maybe they
are right, probably they are right. But if you try writing Greek and
listening to Greek (and speaking Greek, which I have not really
tried yet) you will soon forget that you are doing it to help your
reading, and you will just have fun with it.
The original post was about more of a gaming site, which I
think would be great, but in the mean time, if anyone wants
to write and read simple Greek, please join us at Dialogos.
Instructions can be found at the link below.
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2009-June/049352.html
Any other forums that are set up would be welcomed as well.
Mark L
FWSFOROS
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