[B-Greek] Re-wiring the English brain? (was B-Greek Digest, Vol 97, Issue 7

Shirley Rollinson rollinsondr at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 6 16:10:53 EST 2011


Yassas Marke!
Re-wiring the English brain (or any brain) for a foreign language, particularly with adults, is a problem which those of us who teach Beginning Greek face over and over again.
It may be that some of the members of B-Greek are looking for a bit of help with this, so, for what it's worth, here are my two denarii :
 
Here's how I get my students reading and comprehending from Day 1 (and I've had Navajo, Apache, Chinese, Korean and "Tex.Mex" students, as well as local ranching and farming Anglos over the years) : 
It's "Baby Greek" - we're going back to learning like babies, so we read aloud, and I correct pronunciation. Comprehension will come later. First off - "Read it aloud", then ask the questions.
1. Read the sentence aloud (a new sentence for each student in turn).
     Were any words familiar?
     Notice groups of words with the same endings. (eg. "TOUTOUS TOUS LOGOUS")
2. Find the main action word (Verb)
3. Find the subect - Who is doing What?
      look for nominative markers such as HO  and -OS
4.Find the object - Who is on the receiving end?
      look for accusative markers such as TON and -ON (with warnings about neuters being tricky)
Now we know Who is doing What to Whom.
 
Even if we can't get any further with the Greek, we have the main thought which the sentence is trying to convey. 
So don't worry - the rest is frosting/icing on the cake.
Steps 5 and beyond are looking for Indirect object, adverbs, adjectives, etc. until finally 
"Prophet writes word." turns into 
"The good prophet himself truly writes this new word of peace in that little book."
Such a sentence would be several weeks into the course, but you get the idea.
 
Drillling this way takes the average student about 2 weeks to get the brain re-wired or at least weaned from English word-order.
In our first week (while still consolidating the Alphabet), we read (aloud) and translate Matth. chapter 1 - "The Begats" (with digressions about some of the people, and about how Greeks heard and wrote Hebrew names in their own aural/verbal idiom)
As a spin-off from The Begats - they will never confuse GENNAW and GINOMAI when they meet a GEN- stem.    2 "nu"s = "begat" gets wired into the brain pretty fast.
 
Shirley Rollinson
Eastern New Mexico University
Portales NM 88130, USA
 
"READ, mark, learn, and inwardly digest"
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

--- On Thu, 1/6/11, Mark Lightman <lightmanmark at yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Mark Lightman <lightmanmark at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [B-Greek]Can learning Romanian help you learn Greek? (was Fw: B-Greek Digest, Vol 97, Issue 7
To: "Vasile Stancu" <stancu.c.vasile at gmail.com>, "Shirley Rollinson" <rollinsondr at yahoo.com>
Cc: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Thursday, January 6, 2011, 11:02 AM




Hi, Vasile,

There are two separate questions here, both worthy of discussion.  The first is whether learning a little about Romanian, or any other language, will really help you understand Greek any better.  Linguists like to do this.  They like to explain a Hebrew construction by some analogue to Navaho.  The problem is that one doubts how well the linguist knows either language,  and at any rate,  since the reader knows no Navaho or anything about Navaho, the whole thing just leads to more meta-linguistic abstraction, which is the argument for sticking to the target language.

The other question is which native language will best prepare one for learning Greek.  You obviously know Romanian better than I ever will, so of course it is helpful to YOU.  And it may well be, that Romanian, since it has a middle, is one of the better native languages to start with to learn Greek.  I would think German and Russian, because they are somewhat inflective would also be good.  Italian might be good for a vocab base. 

But I will say this.  English is probably the worse native language to have if you want to learn Greek.  Why?  Two words:  Word and order.   The English brain is programed to think that if something comes first, it is the subject.  If this word is CLOSE to this, it must GO with that.  It is very hard to get over this and begin to internalize the infinitely looser Greek word order.  It can be done, but Lord, it takes much time and re-programming.  Starting with a language with a freer word order would be a huge help, I think.  How free is the Romanian word order?

 Mark L

FWSFOROS MARKOS
 


      


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