ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

When you’re practicing developing your Greek reading skills, here are a few suggestions:

1. Read out loud.
2. Read Greek in chunks — the larger the better, even if you don’t . If you can, start with at least paragraphs and work up the pericopes & perhaps even larger section
3. At the end of each of those sections, pause and write down a small summary of what you did understand, as much as you can.
   – Who was in the paragraph?
   – What did they do?
   – Where were they?
   Stuff like that. But be honest, write down what you actually understood, not what you know the English says — in fact, reading less familiar or unfamiliar texts will be better for you in the long run, even if it is more difficult initially.
4. Optimally, I’d say write your summary in Greek, but I can’t say that I can expect that of most of you.

The goal is that as you read and think about what you actually did understand without thinking in English or looking things up, you’ll find that your Greek is improving & you’ll begin to develop more and more of a natural feel for the language. Your summaries will improve in detail and understanding and you should begin to comprehend more and more over time.

My familiarity with introductory  Hebrew grammars is rather lacking, so I’m interested in some comments.

My wife is beginning first year Hebrew this next week and she’ll be using: Biblical Hebrew, Second Ed. (Yale Language Series) by Bonnie Pedrotti Kittel, Victoria Hoffer, & Rebecca Abts Wright.

Does anyone have any experience with this grammar and have any thoughts on it?

There are a variety of people I’d be interested in hearing from (John Hobbins being one of them; I also know that Mandy uses Kittel for teaching, so I’m curious about her thoughts).

Thanks!

I’m sure many of your remember my poll a while back asking whether you placed a higher priority on reading or analysis.

If you haven’t voted on it, I’d encourage you to do so. I’m interested in your view.

But now I have a follow up question that requires more than clicking a button:

Why did you choose the answer you did? In your mind, what makes reading or analysis more important for your study of the Greek text?

Please feel free to either respond in the comments below or on your own (if you have one). I’d be interested if this turned into a multi-blog discussion if possible. And I know that there are a number of lurkers around here who have never commented. I’m very interested in your opinion too.

I began reading When Dead Tongues Speak today. The first essay was fantastic. Here’s the quote of the day. If it was legal, I’d simply quote the entire essay online. It should be read by anyone teaching or learning a “dead” language.

When I was first teaching, I was more concerned to “cover the grammar” and “finish the book,” and then, I thought, my students would know Latin and Greek. After all, time is short, so it was best, I thought, to focus on what the book had to offer. There were paradigms to be memorized, vocabulary to be studied, exercises to be completed, and passages to translate. Once my students completed these hurdles, I assumed (or at least hoped) that they understood the new grammar well enough and had learned enough vocabulary to move on to the next chapter. Somehow, I expected my students, after memorizing forms, studying vocabulary, and practicing sentences, to be able to read and understand—almost magically—Latin and Greek. And if they could not read yet, I usually gave them more of the same: exercises that focused on sentence-level syntax rather than the strategies needed for reading chunks of discourse. Instead of helping my students learn to read, understand, and interpret Greek and Latin within their cultural context, I was focusing on accuracy at the sentence level, only one aspect of what linguists call communicative competence[*]. In short, I was practicing a theory of language teaching and learning that did not fit with my goal of helping students read Greek and Latin fluently and accurately, of appreciating it as a “living” language. What I needed to do was to reexamine these assumptions in the light of what I hoped my students would be able to do after they had studied beginning Latin and Greek.

—John Gruber-Miller, “Communication, Context and Community: Integrating the Standards in the Greek and Latin Classroom,” in When Dead Tongues Speak: Teaching Beginning Greek and Latin edited by John Gruber-Miller (APA Classical Resources Series; Oxford: University Press, 2006), 3-4 (Google books: HERE).

*Note: Gruber-Miller’s use of the word “communicative” and “communicate in this essay, primarily refers to the communication of the Greek and Latin authors to the contemporary reader. This should be clear from the following sentences in the quote above.

This post provides some thoughts on a question posed to me by Daniel from Hebrew and Greek Reader.

Specifically, Daniel was wondering about my thoughts on the benefit of learning Modern Greek (or Hebrew for that matter – but this blog is about Greek) via contemporary language learning methodology such as TPR (Total Physical Response) and TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling). Their basic claim with which we all already know I disagree is that it would be better to learn the modern form of the language rather than the ancient one.

This is a difficult issue for me for a couple reasons:

1) I am definitely all for the learning of the modern form, to an extent.

2) But at the same time, I do not believe the learning of Modern Greek “communicatively” can replace the “communicative” learning of Hellenistic Greek – even if it can be used as a very helpful supplement.

Why?

Well for point #1, the words, “to an extent.” One of the big criticisms I’ve been given for my views on Greek language learning result for the impracticality of implementing such methods in the seminary. And for that same reason (and infinitely more so), I hold the very same view for the benefit of learning Modern Greek. This is not to say that scholars shouldn’t know the language, because they should. There is too much important literature on Hellenistic Greek in Greek that the vast majority of scholar cannot access (its somewhat embarrassing that most NT scholars cannot reading secondary literature that’s in the very same language they specialize in).

But scholars should also be learning Modern Greek because having a grasp of the language beyond the Hellenistic period is essential for understanding Greek in the NT. Caragounis got this point right. He overemphasized it and then beat it to death. But he still got it right. The thing is, its not something new. A dozen or so scholars from the last century, including Moulton & Robertson, said the same thing – but most NT students and scholars don’t read Moulton and Robertson all the way through. Moulton is pretty easy. His Prolegomena is a great read and it’s really not hard or very long. And as for Robertson, well, every Greek student should at least read straight through the first 140 pages. That’s the introduction and it very much sets the stage for being able to use the rest of his grammar as a reference grammar correctly. I’m currently working on reading the whole thing through cover to cover – I’m on page 303.

I’d say learning Modern Greek should be a higher priority for the NT scholar than learning German. But thjs is for the scholar, not the pastor.

Now, onto point #2 (incidentally, if this were Koine, that “now” at the beginning would have been a δέ).  has to do with the fact that language is really not divisible from culture. No this isn’t the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Think George Lakoff instead – Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things & Metaphors We Live By. By internalizing Hellenistic Greek rather than Modern Greek would give students an opportunity (that would hopefully be pounced on by the teacher) to also learn the culture as well. In my imaginary perfect world, learning about culture would be done at the exact same time as learning the language. Hitting two birds with one stone, if you like. One of the problems with current methodology, as I see it (and I hate to say it, but this includes D&T’s Hebrew syllabus) is that for some reason language teachers at least appear to think that they can successfully teach the language without at the same time teaching the culture expressed by that language.

But culture learning could be implemented into traditional methodology. Yes. I think, though, that culture learning could thrive in communicative learning. Instead of simply learning χάρις as “grace.” Students would learn it as χάρις with all the cultural ramifications of the world for a first century Hellenistic Jew. In English that sort of thing would require significantly more hoops for the student to jump through. They would first learn that the word means grace and then they would like be required to read a several hundred pages, particularly Frederick W. Danker’s Benefactor: Epigraphic Study of a Graeco-Roman and New Testament Semantic Fieldas well as Bruce W. Winter’s Seek the Welfare of the City: Christians as Benefactors and Citizens (First-Century Christians in the Graeco-Roman World). Then after all of that students would understand that grace isn’t this special theological word that means “unmerited favor,” but it specifically relates to a highly developed social system of patronage, benefaction, honor, and favor, which was then apply by the NT writers to describe what God has done (and continues to do) for us.

…or you could just learn Hellenistic Greek as Hellenistic Greek without reference to English at all – that would be faster.

But again coming to the question of how modern methodologies would work in a seminary, I cannot say. But I would suggest that keeping an eye of Bethel, Denver and Ashland Seminaries might be a good idea for those seminary professors who are apprehensive about it.

In light of the relatively recent discussions on the subject on a variety of blogs, I’d like to point you a recent book review on the Linguist List:

Meaning in the Second Language

AUTHOR: Slabakova, Roumyana
TITLE: Meaning in the Second Language
SERIES: Studies on Language Acquisition [SOLA] 34
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2008

The book sounds very interesting. Perhaps I’ll keep an eye out for it at the UBC library – its $100 on Amazon.

…which reminds me: I still have a half written post waiting in the wings on my thoughts on the practicality of learning Modern Greek for studying Hellenistic Greek.

I’ll see about finishing that this weekend.

Seumas over at  Complaint (no…) Compilant (not right either…) Compliant Subversity (<- there we go!) has some helpful tips for moving forward toward actually acquiring Greek or Hebrew as a second language (or in D&T’s terms second language learning).

Do check it out.

http://jeltzz.blogspot.com/2009/06/conversational-dead-languages-vi.html

Previously, we introduced what seems to be the main issue for Daniel & Tonya:

The Sustainability of Communicative Methodology.

In our first post, we argued two points.

1. Traditional Methodology post-seminary (or college/university) is not sustainable already so questioning the sustainability of Communicative Methods is a non-issue.
2. In terms of within the classroom, Communicative Methodology is actually more sustainable because more students actually stay in the class.

I want to grab hold of point #2 for a moment. The very fact that Communicative Methods are more sustainable within the class, I would argue makes it more likely for them to be sustained outside the class for the very reason that there are more students learning the language.

Okay, I’ve not got that out of my system. Moving on.

This post is going to focus on the question/challenge of post-classroom sustainability for studying Greek. Let’s first look at the issue for traditional methodology first.

As I said previously, we can all admit that the majority of pastors do not sustain their language training, at least not to a level that would be considered sufficient in the eyes of their teachers.

But the few that do maintain their skills. What do they do? Well, most of their work is done by relying on memorization, paradigms, and lexicons. The vast majority of the time, its a whole lot of repetition. And those are the ones who make it. They put in a good chunk of time sustaining their Greek. The others, well, they remember something about the aorist and talk in their sermons about the active voice as if it means something about action. Sigh…I still need to talk to that particular pastor.

What about sustainability for communicative methodology?

Well, at the present time, we really cannot say much at all about it. We simply don’t know. We just know the traditional methods don’t create sustainability.

But at the same time, communicative methodology does give us something, something that D&T touched on, accepted as true, and then passed by.

Internalization.

D&T agreed with Seumas that it was a very good point that communicative methods internalize the language. And they questioned me for not mentioning that fact when I brought up the same point (why mention it when they don’t consider it necessary anyway?). Here’s the comment again:

We’ve not ignored the benefit of communicative methods as relates to internalization. Actually, we acknowledged it at the end of “Conversing with Seumas 3″. But it seems you have ignored our point after agreeing with it.

If, as you agree, ministers don’t need conversational Koine in their ministry, then they also have no need to internalize it. I’ve never run across the pastor whose needed to be able to speak the Greek that Paul uses. They all need to be able to interpret it and, we would add, be able to translate it for their congregations. To accomplish this, one need not internalize any conversational Koine.

Of course it’ll help if you do. But that’s not the point. The point is that its not necessary. And with the burden of time many students who are ministers face, time is better spent only on necessary things.

The basic argument here, I think, is something like this:

1. Communicative Methods are helpful for internalizing the language.
2. Internalization is only necessary if you plan on actually conversing in the language.
3. Pastors don’t need to converse in Ancient Greek.
4. Internalization is not necessary for Ancient Greek.

D&T and I both agree on point #1 there. Such methods are helpful for internalizing the language. We also agree on point #3 (well, mostly). Pastors probably don’t need to converse in Ancient Greek.

But its points #2 & #4 that I cannot and will not accept.

In fact I consider them baseless.

If a person has internalized the language and vocabulary and then also learned to read in said language. They will be able to consistently sustain that language to a reasonably acceptable degree. And when you combine that with audio and the internet, the possibilities are endless for the maintenance of the language.

Its the issue of how a language is sustained that is the true difference between an ancient language and a modern language. Both types of languages can and should be taught using communicative methodology. But when it comes to maintaining them, very different approaches must be used. You maintain an ancient language differently than a modern language

And when am ancient language is learned and internalized rather than merely decoded, we will have better exegetes who, instead of trudging through the details to determine the meaning the of the text, will be able to naturally read and understand the meaning of the text. We won’t have to worry about them getting caught up on little points that are irrelevant but are turned into some sort of major discovery.

So the issue isn’t, “Communcative Methods aren’t sustainable,” its, “Traditional Methods aren’t sustainable, Communicative Methods are currently untested, how can we ensure them to be sustainable?”

Daniel & Tonya’s comment on my first post were very helpful in drawing the focus on the main issue. I think that I’m beginning to see where we’re missing each other. I also appreciate their pointing out a mistake of my own. I had not intended to, but I ended up accidentally taking one of their statements (from my Point #1) out of context. At some point, I’d also like to deal with the issue of the Antiochene Fathers, which D&T consider too advanced for seminary students. I would thoroughly contest that, but I’ll deal with that in a later post.

So what’s the main issue?

What is D&T’s essential protest against communicative methodology?

Well, for them, it is sustainability.

If I’m reading their comments correctly, D&T and I have very different views regarding what the goal of communicative methodology is. I hope I’m wrong about this (and I might be), but D&T seem to believe that for communicative methodology to be valid its practitioners and students must be able to continue to speak the language as a language later on down the road outside and beyond the class room. I think this comes from the fact that most modern methodology has been used with modern languages where the final goal is sustainability. Here are the relevant statements that come directly from their comment on my first post, for the context, I’d suggest reading the post and the full comment:

[Responding to My Point #2:]
Another issue is sustainability. Communicative languages need to be regularly used by L2 users for them to hang onto them. If I don’t keep up the modern Hebrew that I know, I’ll lose it. How are seminarians supposed to keep up conversational Koine five or ten years after seminary with no speakers or at least classmates to practice with?

[Responding to My Point #3]
We’ve not ignored the benefit of communicative methods as relates to internalization. Actually, we acknowledged it at the end of “Conversing with Seumas 3″. But it seems you have ignored our point after agreeing with it.

If, as you agree, ministers don’t need conversational Koine in their ministry, then they also have no need to internalize it. I’ve never run across the pastor whose needed to be able to speak the Greek that Paul uses. They all need to be able to interpret it and, we would add, be able to translate it for their congregations. To accomplish this, one need not internalize any conversational Koine.

Of course it’ll help if you do. But that’s not the point. The point is that its not necessary. And with the burden of time many students who are ministers face, time is better spent only on necessary things.

[Responding to My Point #5]
The goal the teacher has for the student is…. The goal of the student who knows what’s good for himself is…

Unfortunately, most are just trying to get it out of the way. Yes modern methods are fun. But are they practical and sustainable for biblical language students. We think not. It seems the communicative method that your wife was taught, though it sounds amazing, was not sustainable outside of that classroom.

Now, that’s a lot to deal with in one post, but I’m going to try because we’re talking about the same thing through it all. In three of their five responses to my first post, we come back to the issue of sustainability.

First of all, the good news is that I have not ignored the fact that D&T recognize the benefit of internalization. I did not discuss it or mention it because of exactly what we see in their comment: right after protesting my not mentioning it, they essentially discard it as irrelevant. Why should I even mention it when they don’t think its necessary anyway?

But back to sustainability.

The irony here is that sustainability is one of the largest reasons that I advocate such methodology. It is rather indisputable that the biggest problem for Greek and Hebrew programs is the very fact that the traditional methods do not work. Pastors are not using the languages. And the pastors whose analysis work is the best typically rely more and the commentaries of the scholars than they do their own working through the text. And I’d trust a pastor who knows how little he’s maintained his Greek and goes to the commentaries one time too often than the pastor who thinks that he’s kept it up better than he has and doesn’t go to the commentaries at all.

Many pastors are completely terrible at doing their own analysis of the text. In fact, many can’t.

But when we talk about communicative methodology, for some reason we cannot get past the idea that since there is communication in the class that communication is a necessary component for a pastor to continue using the language five years later. I don’t consider that to be a valid assumption. More on that in a moment.

But the current situation with traditional methodology is this:

1) We know for a fact that the current teaching methods have a very high attrition rate beyond the seminary.

2) We have no clue what kind of attrition rate communicative methodology will have beyond the classroom.

Considering where we are now, there’s not much too loose.

Just the status quo.

And I haven’t even said anything about the attrition rate of the classroom itself, which is completely horrible. D&T themselves experienced a 60% attrition rate in their class and I’m cynical that the 4 students left standing at the end will all be using their Hebrew in five years (for the record, they make it clear that they have more confidence on that point than I do). Traditional methodology requires maintenance outside the classroom as well – just as much, I’d say.

Here’s the classroom attrition rate of my own traditional Greek learning:

Now isn’t that nice and depressing? And from what I understand, its pretty consistent in other schools. In preparing for this post, I talk with Daniel Streett on what the attrition rate looked like in his communicative class. He told me that it was 25%. That’s relatively high and he’s not satisfied with it. And in context, it actually looks better than either D&T’s class or my own chart above.

Why?

Well, at Moody, where I attended, most students take one full year in order to get their general language requirement out of the way – that’s why in my chart we see a drop after the first year. And then pastoral/pre-seminary students are required to take 3 semesters of either Greek or Hebrew, which explains the second major drop from 45 down to 25. Then the drop from 25 to about 6 or 7 results from the fact that Biblical Language students are only required to take two years of a language and many of them don’t begin until their junior year. They can only fit in two years total. That’s unfortunately what happened to me, though I like to think that I’ve made up for it.

But at Criswell College, where Daniel Streett teaches, students are required one year. The best comparison to make is between his class with its 25% attrition rate and the other 1st year Greek class, which has an attrition rate of 75%: from 20 to about 5-6 after the first semester.

That’s a huge different. So in terms of in school attrition, communicative methods are already doing significantly better.

And that brings us back to beyond the classroom and beyond the school, which is, I think, the more significant criticism in D&T’s view. And we’ll look at it next.

There are a few of background posts with their comment threads over at Daniel & Tonya’s blog that help put this discussion on language learning in context. The comments, in particular, are helpful in showing where D&T and I are in this discussion and where we have already been:

http://hebrewandgreekreader.wordpress.com/2008/11/27/adam-the-artist/

http://hebrewandgreekreader.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/getting-specific-the-problem-of-vocabulary/

I’m pretty sure that there are a couple other posts, but I couldn’t locate them.