[B-Greek] David Black on learning Greek

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Sat Oct 2 07:30:02 EDT 2010


>from what I've seen, one difficulty many have with learning any second lang.
> is that they don't really understand grammatical terminology in their own
> lang., and thus can't understand such terminology when used to describe
> another one.  That is, they don't know the "language of language," and
> no matter how smart you are, if you don't know the language of the lecture,
> you ain't gonna get it. (1 Cor. 14:11).
>


Some of this can be ameliorated by by teaching communicatively. That is, the
teaching is done in contexts where the meaning is understanded BEFORE the
grammatical description of 'how it works'.

Now this may sound 'counterintuitive',
but one of the reasons that I like to use Greek terminology is so that students
will not rely on the 'grammar term' for their learning of Greek. That,
and the Greek
term keeps people in Greek rather than taking everyone out into another
language. I'm not against another language, per se, it's just that it
needs to be
limited to to 30-60 seconds or so. If the 30 seconds doesn't solve it, several
minutes more won't usually help, but I've seen it hurt. English
lectures are for
later. (Our homework material has more than enough English to keep anyone
'happy', everything is glossed and/or footnoted, since it is designed as
'self-study'.)

PARATATIKH continuative vs AORISTOS aorist aren't so hard as forms in
contrasting contexts, and the terminology doesn't really add anything.
MESH middle can basically be treated as 'another category' for verbs.
ERXOMAI, XRWMAI TINI, BOULOMAI TI, POREUOMAI.
HLQON,    EXRHSAMHN,   EBOULHQHN,  EPOREYQHN.
You've gotta love the Greeks. And we can always take courage in
watching how children just accept that   'that's how it's done.'
We don't get into passives at the beginning, and when we do, it's just
one of those MESH types that gets used. Kinda easy.
Quite a few of the syntactical 'tricky' things only come into play when
people are communicating in strings of several clauses.

And always remember the 'universal rule of grammar'
"We do it like that because that's the way they do it."

This seems to work for the Swahili concord system. They must have
about forty ways to say 'this'/'that', and not related to 'cases'. When in
doubt say something and let the fluent speaker help you
along.

on becoming a child in kiSwahili,

Bwana Yoani

-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life



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