I'd be interested in starting a new group to study White's First Greek Book and excerpts of Xenophon's Anabasis, with a slightly novel approach. I'd like to supplement the translation exercises in White with other exercises, and place more emphasis on reading and understanding Greek than on translation. The online exercises for Athenaze (http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/greek/) at the University of Victoria using the software "Hot Potatoes" from the same University(http://hotpot.uvic.ca/) gave me the idea of creating our own exercises to help master the material with less tedious memorization of paradigms and vocabulary lists and avoiding the translation mentality. I also use Athenaze and Reading Greek (and I'd welcome study partners for those texts, as well.) But the fact that the White and Xenophon texts are in the public domain means we could use passages of Xenophon (either from the original, or from White's simplified version) for sentence gap exercises, matching, finding or highlighting or copying words or examples of grammatical forms under study, answering comprehension assessment questions, etc. Of course, we could also do other things: link to other sites (for instance, the imperfect and aorist tenses are introduced very briefly in White, with far too little practice with them), record audio files, and bring in excerpts from other texts (for example, the Septuagint) to illustrate usage.
I'm willing to put in the work to organize the group and to try to get some online exercises using Hot Potoates up and running. Not having an advanced level of expertise in Greek (I'm at about Lesson 30 in White and I'm just reaching the point now of being able to read and understand Xenophon), myself, we would greatly benefit from more advanced students of Greek here on Textkit.
What do others think? Is this much more difficult than I imagine? Or is there too little interest in an old book like White to get a study group started?
Lee
