Good morning:

I teach Greek full time and would be interested in suggestions on pedagogy;

what was helpful when you took Greek?

What was the most distracting?

What texts did you use, what workbooks.

Thanks in advance.

John

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John
Evangelical Free Church, no offices held
Langhorne, PA

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Something I wish I had received, but did not--

Instead of spending any time, during an introductory lecture (which will be forgotten soon anyway) on why this is important, write a paper on the mechanics of what this study will entail over the next (however long the curriculum goes), all the way out to the end. This would be especially helpful to those going on to MDiv.

What I mean is this:
1) learning a language primarily to read and study it is not the same as many of us recall learning English.

2) In the first year I learned all the basics

3) In my second year, we moved on to grammar. It was not until maybe the middle of the second semester that I really comprehended what we were doing.

4) Here's how I explained it to MYSELF. In the first year, we got all the building materials: bricks, mortar, hammers, nails, lumber, etc. And we learned how some of those things went together--lay bricks overlapping; measure twice, cut once, yada yada. We learned a few rules, memorized words and paradigms, and practiced translating.

5) We did NOT start building a house the next course.
We studied architecture. Foreign architecture.


I am not laying this at my professor's feet, like it was his fault. I had a hard time with fractions too, in grade school. And one day it clicked. We used a premier grammar (or what I consider an excellent one), Wallace. The professor certainly knew Greek forwards and backwards, and his own Introductory Grammar, first year, was an excellent tool. I still go back and look at things in it on occasion.

I just don't remember getting the lecture that said: this is a different sort of animal; this is analytic; the fork is branched here; we are going forensic; this is architecture, not construction. And a PAPER which can be referred to over and over is better than the lecture which was forgotten after two weeks of paradigms and vocab.

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Rev. Bruce G. Buchanan
ChainOLakes Presbyterian Church, CentralLake, MI


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I strongly suggest using my professor's Greek textbook entitled _From Alpha to Omega_, by Anne Groton. It is published by Focus. I wish to make the case that learning only Koine Greek is a mistake. This is my beef with, say, Machen's grammar. It is not laid out systematically, because it is made to help you read the New Testament only. But if you teach students to read Greek period (especially classical), then they will be able to read New Testament with only a minimum of corrections necessary on the differences. The New Testament is not the only thing worth reading in Greek. Plus, teaching classical will make reading the NT easy. I strongly suggest this method. There is a workbook that goes along with the textbook that gives extra exercizes. If you train students to be able to read Shakespeare, then they will be able to read John Grisham, or anything else in English, for that matter.

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Rev. Lane Keister
Teaching Elder, PCA, North Dakota (working out of bounds in a CRC and an RCA church)
http://greenbaggins.wordpress.com
http://brahmsgreenglove.blogspot.com
http://accenttranslation.blogspot.com

P.S. The more exercizes the better. Those paradigms have to be well in hand. I especially appreciated the English to Greek exercizes, since that forced me to think in that language.

I just finished my first year of classical Greek. We used Hansen & Quinn's text and I loved it. It reminded me a lot of Wheelock's Latin: no-nonsense grammar with lots of drills. H&Q is good because it focuses primarily on grammar and doesn't load the student down with too much vocabulary while also expecting him to remember hundreds of verb forms.

I couldn't agree more with everything Lane has said. In my opinion, the best thing a student can do is drill himself incessantly. At the end of every unit in H&Q are drills which contain short sentences, then a set of exercises with longer sentences. While we always were required to do the longer exercises for homework, I wish that our professor would have required us to do the shorter drills for homework, too. Nothing helps learn a new piece of syntax better than doing 30 drills which all repeat that piece of syntax with different words. Doing the longer exercises after doing all the unit drills was a piece of cake.

I also believe that there should be more emphasis on composition in beginning courses. This may seem difficult, and students may never be required to write a paper in Greek, but composition forces one to think in Greek. When a student can write a sentence with each kind of indirect statement without too much thought, he will be able to recognize it exponentially more easily than if he had no training in actively expressing himself in Greek.

The extra work pays off!

I'm sure this is true of any text, but H&Q includes passages from classical Greek literature at the end of each unit which the student should be able to read (with glossed vocab at the bottom) at that point. This provides some refreshment to the sometimes monotonous process of learning the language thoroughly.

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Davidius
Member: First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Durham (RPCNA) - Durham, NC
Student: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, German Literature and Classics

And though the really inspired artist may complain that, with the majority, piano-playing is mere strumming, and painting little more than daubing, yet, the exuberant feeling of having a share in the privileges of art is so overwhelming, that the scorn of the artist is preferred to the abandonment of art training in education. To have laid a production of your own, however poor, upon the altar of art becomes more and more the characteristic of an accomplished civilization. - Abraham Kuyper