On hearing (and uttering) Greek aloud

From: Edward Hobbs (EHOBBS@wellesley.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 29 1996 - 14:41:44 EDT


From: LUCY::EHOBBS "Edward Hobbs" 29-JUL-1996 13:39:20.77
To: IN%"74144.2360@compuserve.com"
CC: EHOBBS
Subj: RE: Online Greek Grammar

Jonathan Robie wrote,in part:

<6. Read the passage out loud in the Greek New Testament from UBS

<But this is based on 1 1/2 years, 30 minutes to 1 hour a day. I am not a
<Greek scholar by any means.

Jonathan has made use of a tremendously valuable aid in his learning of
Greek: his sense of hearing. Most students learn with the sense of sight
only (which is how even modern languages used to be taught in the USA,
explaining why Americans could rarely understand speakers of other
languages). Granted that classical and Hellenistic Greek are "dead"
languages in the traditional sense, there is still no reason to abandon the
help which the sense of hearing provides for language learning.

A month from now, it will be 49 years since I began teaching ancient Greek
at the university level; the requirement that students read texts aloud
during their preparation at home has been a major factor in whatever merit
my teaching has had. (My first year, 1947-48, I taught both a first-year
class of beginners, and a second-year class taught by someone else in the
usual way. By February, my first-year class was advanced beyond the second-
year class, in part--I believe--due to the great advantage the first-year
class had; the second-year students seemed not to be able to pick up the sounds
in a natural way, having learned that Greek was a pattern of letters on a page,
not a real language.)

Reading Greek aloud every day (EVERY day!) can keep one's Greek alive for
years, even when one can't spend time studying or "keeping up."

So -- this all means that I warmly endorse Jonathan's method!

Edward Hobbs



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