A year of Greek
In December 2013 I began the serious study of Greek. It has now been one year, and a discussion of my results and methods may be of interest to others.
I have historically been an indifferent language learner. I studied Spanish for 2 years in middle school (and lived in New Mexico most of my life) and studied German for 4 years in high school. I did not apply myself to either language in a serious way, and have very little results to show for either. I studied Japanese more seriously for a number of years starting in college. 2-3 semesters of classwork and several years studying on my own. My studying was neither efficient nor effective. I was able to learn the meanings of the 2000 Japanese characters (for a time), but eventually became disappointed when I found out that knowledge of the English meanings of the Japanese characters was not the same as reading fluency. I never attained any sort of conversational fluency. Mostly I tried to read through textbooks and memorize grammar rules, but without daily consistence. I watched a fair amount of television, read comic books, etc., for input, but never became able to comprehend more than snatches of spoken Japanese. For the past few years I have devoted very little effort to Japanese. I have preferred to concentrate on mathematics and physics — where my talents mostly lay.
Now I have always been a fan of acquiring different Homer and Bible translations, and comparing their texts. I became interested in the Synoptic problem, and also Paul’s letters, what he meant, which he actually wrote, and the problem of the paucity of connection between epistolary Christianity and gospel Christianity.
At some point I acquired BeDuhn’s book (the same one that our own Isaac Newton is so impressed by). I was distressed to read his description of Bible translation as something that involved writing down all the English meanings and grammar information underneath each word, and then constructing an English translation.
All of this sparked my interest in learning Greek for myself. I don’t remember my exact thoughts, but I hoped that it would be easier that Japanese, since I could learn from reading without memorizing thousands of arbitrary characters. (I now think that this is probably wrong, and hope to return to Japanese at some point.) Regardless, I began looking for methods to learn Greek. I started out with Croy’s “Primer of Biblical Greek.” Following the first few chapters, I found myself unimpressed by the abundant table-memorizing, and paucity of actual Greek. I downloaded a few reconstructed Koine audio files from the web and listened to them, but didn’t pick up much.
I did not spend much time studying, but eventually found Daniel Streett and become very impressed. (Again, I had found something that has caught Isaac Newton’s interest, Strett’s “Do They Know Greek” quiz.) Following Strett’s recommendations, I purchased Buth’s Living Koine course, and listened to the first few lessons, but then became bored of the word and picture lessons, and did not apply myself any further. It mostly felt too slow. I wanted an actual conversation class.
Sometime in 2013, I took an hour-a-week online class with Michael Halcomb at what is now the “Conversational Koine Institute.” I was excited at the chance to learn in this way, which sounded so much like what Buth was doing. The first few classes were wonderful, and so were a few story-based classes, but most of our time later was wasted memorizing declension tables (but in Greek!). There were no written materials for the class (and we were asked not to make notes). Not surprisingly, this was far less effective than memorizing the same table from a book would have been. I felt that the conversational method had promise, but was not being conducted in a useful way.
At the end of all this, I could understand the Greek numbers when spoken aloud, learned from Halcomb. I could understand a few nouns and verbs, learned from Buth and Halcomb. But the written language was a mystery (since all my practice had been audio and spoken language). I could not read the Greek characters with the pronunciation that I had learned from Halcomb / Buth! I knew the Greek letters only from mathematics. It was the tail-end of 2013 and I had more or less zero Greek.
Beginning in December 2013, however, I began investing a serious amount of time into Greek (often several hours a day), and have continued that.
I had discovered an article about something called the Hamiltonian system for learning (teaching) languages. This is basically just teaching students a word-for-word English translation of a language, premised on the idea that what you need more than anything else to learn a language is a vast amount of vocabulary. Hamilton believed in rearranging the word order in the foreign tongue to match English (something that I balked at, and still do not think is wise). However I found his version of Xenophon’s Anabasis. I also found the interlinear translations of the Bible at biblehub.com, and purchased (on Streett’s recommendation) the Spiros Zodhiates audio CDs of the New Testament (read with a modern Greek pronunciation).
My method at the beginning was fairly simple. I would listen to the audio CDs, and reproduce those sounds for myself. Then I would use the interlinear to learn the meaning of each word. Then I would go back to the original text and read aloud. I would repeat this with a section of text until I felt that I could understand it and go on to another one. For the Bible, I also listed to the CDs until I could understand what was being said. I did not waste time studying grammar. I used the modern Greek pronunciation for Xenophon as well as Koine.
Eventually, I became a little distressed at how much vowel collision there was in the Zodhiates recordings compared to what I had learned from Halcomb / Buth. I wanted to be able to read Homer someday, after all. I considered going back to a recovered Koine pronunciation, but finally settled on reading through Allen’s Vox Graeca. Recovered Koine, to me, appeared to be an “easy version” of a recovered pronunciation. It drops pitch accent for no good historical reason. Why not practice the real thing? In addition, I was now spending most of my time on Anabasis, not Koine (I think following someone on Textkit’s advice that learning Attic was better since it would teach you both, but also because Xenophon is so much fun). Therefore I started following Allen as best as I could, using audio from forvo.com for his pronunciation examples. I also got anyone I could at textkit.com to critique my recordings and to tell me what I was doing wrong. I made major shifts in pronunciation several times, which seriously impacted my nascent reading comprehension, but it became easier to shift each time.
More than anything else, this daily reading exercise was fun and interesting compared to any other method of language learning that I had tried. I was reading actual Greek, learning interesting things, and found that I was making visible progress, with a piece of “conquered” text to show for it.
Along the way, I discovered Thrasymachus and W.H.D. Rouse’s Greek Boy, and eventually dropped Hamilton’s interlinear (by that time I was at the point where a translation was as good as an interlinear for my method). After about 9 months (August), my audio recordings became good enough that I could use them for learning (on 1.5x speed-up). I would listen to the Greek audio while reading through the translation, and repeat until I could understand the audio without a translation. Over the next few months I made it through the next few books of the Anabasis, and read a fair amount of other stuff besides.
The other day I came back to Mark, and found that I could read it easily and without a dictionary! Parts of it that I had never seen before! I read through it in just a few hours. Then I got out the old Zodhiates recordings that I had put on the shelf, and gave them a listen. I could understand him, though not as easily as I could read the text. (And I can understand my own recordings even better, but I am not as smooth or as fluent sounding as Zodhiates, so lately I prefer to listen to his audio, with its much better cadence.) I also started a review read of Anabasis. Some parts (almost all of Book I) I could read as easily as Mark. Other parts slowed me down considerably. Chapter I.9 is still tough for me. Book II is fairly good, and I haven’t gotten to Book III yet in my re-read. New sections of Anabasis vary in difficulty for me. Some I can understand just by reading, for others I need to go back to English aids.
The other week I looked at Greek Boy again (I put it down for weeks sometimes, and then come back to it). I found that I can read easily up until Chapter XIX now, where it starts to slow me down. (Some LSJ/TLG work told me that Rouse is actually grabbing some of his text from Pollucis onomasticon! Which looks like a such great learning resource, actually.) I picked up Thrasymachus (I had dropped it some months ago in the middle), and was able to read through nearly the whole book in a few hours.
Obviously, I still have a very long way to go. But I am mostly pleased by my progress. My goal now is to get 1 million sentences of input over the next 3 years (http://www.antimoon.com/how/input-howmuch.htm). I also want to start producing a lot more Greek. I started composition several times, but gave it up as less efficient than reading (for where I was at then). Now I think that I’m at a place where I can learn by doing.
I continue to expect and appreciate the help of everyone at Textkit in my learning journey! I have made myself a sometimes obnoxious visitor to these forums, mostly because I feel that the proper place of a language learner is to make a fool of himself as often as possible until he learns.
All of this study has been in my spare time. I work full time, and was married in August. I will be 35 years old in a few weeks.
Some things that have inspired me along the way:
C.S. Lewis account in Surprised by Joy. There is a short excerpt here: http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2011/06/beginning-to-think-in-greek.html
Heinrich Schliemann (some of this is likely exaggerated, but the man knew languages)
http://books.google.com/books?id=7QAdAAAAYAAJ
pg. 9-11,14-16
antimoon.com — A wealth of resources here.
Kató Lomb
http://www.tesl-ej.org/books/lomb-2nd-Ed.pdf
Laudator Temporis Acti (http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com) has a number of wonderful quotations about learning and reading Greek and reading lists, etc., and is one of my favorite daily reads. Especially when I can understand the day’s Greek quotation without first looking at the translation!