I have begun to learn koine Greek in the last couple of weeks. As an Orthodox Christian, my priest recommended I study Elements of New Testament Greek. After some research online (watching a YouTube video) I ended up opting for Beginning (or Getting Started) with New Testament Greek by Merkle and Plummer. I’m 5 chapters in, I’m not finding it too difficult - although I find the Southern American Erasmian pronunciation rather annoying in their supplementary videos. Due to this, I went searching for how we should properly pronounce ancient Greek. Turns out it’s a bit of a minefield.
I have opted for the Lucian pronunciation. I tried reconstructed koine for a bit, however the monothongised dipthongs made my ability to spell worse. I will be starting in a Greek church soon where presumably they’ll use modern pronunciation, this has an even greater problem than reconstructed koine for figuring out how things are spelt. So for now, I will learn using Lucian and then maybe transition to modern or reconstructed once I’m comfortable with spelling.
In my research on pronunciation, I learned of the debate between grammar-translation and natural method techniques. I personally want to be able to fluently read and hear the language rather than be able to translate. My question for you guys is whether I should stick with the grammar-translation book I have, or switch to Athenaze? After learning the distinction, I purchased Mark Jeong’s A Greek Reader which is meant to supplement a grammar-translation textbook. I worry though that it doesn’t go far enough, I don’t want to foster a translation habit if it’ll hinder my ability to comprehend text natively.
With that being said, I do think it would be useful to understand the grammar and know how nouns decline and verbs conjugate. So I’m wondering if I should stick with the grammar, but skip the translation exercises, and maybe skip learning the words too??? I’m also familiar with the Dowling and Ranieri-Dowling method. I guess this would complement me reading through the grammar in the fashion I outlined above well.
So to put everything together: Work through the grammar, skipping translation exercises and perhaps learning words, memorise the tables off by heart (in accordance to Ranieri-Dowling (I’ve purchased the audio)), then move on to Athenaze and A Greek Reader? Or should I do this stuff simultaneously? Or quit the grammar and switch to Athenaze? Or do the grammar in its entirety and go straight to a reader’s edition New Testament?
Curious to hear your thoughts. Sorry for rambling on so much. I just want to go about this as efficiently as possible; I keep hearing horror stories of people studying for 5+ years and still not be able to read. Or worse yet, professors who have been doing it for 20 years and know the grammar and word translations like the back of their hand - but can’t just read it normally.
One thing that I still wonder about is how many people can actually “read it normally.” To me, this would mean, “read it like books in your native language.”
I made the Random Greek Passages thread to measure people’s ability at this, but for whatever reason it never gets much action. Hopefully that will change someday.
As far as advice, what I’m doing with my kids at the moment, is reading aloud Latin to them, asking them to translate it to English, and then asking them to translate their English back to Latin. I don’t know if it works yet or not, but I can let you know in a few years.
Ha ha, fair enough. Looking forward to hearing back in a few years
One thing I wonder about is how many of the proponents of the natural method learned entirely through the natural method. My understanding is that most of them did grammar-translation ‘unsuccessfully’ for a while then switched to natural method. I wonder if the grammar stage was useful in order to make the natural method work?
My two cents: the natural method doesn’t ignore the grammar; you just learn it in a different way and pace. And you don’t memorize “raw” vocabulary: context is everything. I don’t “believe” the grammar+translation can really work. It turns you into a puzzle solver, that’s all. On the other hand, the natural method should be used in a proper way. I think people make too many mistakes when trying to use the natural method and the method gets blamed for people’s mistakes. As I said, my 2 cents.
If you’re interested in a natural method there is now “Logos” by Santiago Carbonell Martínez - all in Greek, no translation. I haven’t seen it, but I think it’s a great idea. In general, however, I think it would be very hard to learn like that without a teacher. In fact I think it would be very hard to learn any language without a teacher if you don’t already know a closely related language.
Even with a teacher it’s hard, come to think of it.
Anyway, I am not personally a fan of translating from Greek to English as a way of learning or reading - I prefer reading for understanding. This is what Athenaze offers in the “story” sections, with comprehension questions (in English). If you get ‘Alexandros’ instead, even the questions are in Greek.
Athenaze also has a lot of translation exercises, both Greek to English and English to Greek. If i were you I’d just read the former for understanding but translate the latter.
Finally, if you want to be able to read Greek in any sense “normally” I think you have to learn the grammar well enough to recognise the forms of the words. The vocabulary beyond the basics you can learn as you go (a graded reader or student’s edition with a vocabulary list will save you a lot of time), but if you can’t tell at first glance if a word is an infinitive, third person plural subjunctive, singular noun in the dative etc (ok, there’ll be some ambiguous ones, but by and large you should be able tell) I don’t see how you’ll be able to get anywhere.
Hi Jonathan, I wouldn’t worry about pronunciation. As for reading ancient Greek, it’s true, there’s really no way to do that without understanding the grammar. So yes, you have to learn the grammar, and there’s no short cut to that.
That doesn’t mean you have to translate. “Grammar-translation” is two separate things. Translation is a secondary activity, useful only for conveying your understanding to others.
Ok, from reading and compiling your responses it seems that there’s a consensus that translation from Greek to English is to be avoided. There’s some conflict over whether I should learn grammar explicitly or implicitly through the natural method. I think I’ll try to learn it explicitly.
So the current plan is to work through the grammar, skip translation and memorising vocab. Then after brute memorisation of grammar rules I’ll either use Athenaze or Logos. Not sure yet which one is better. I’ll work through the Greek Reader I have while learning the grammar.
You can learn the grammar while working your way through Athenaze - each chapter starts with a reading which features (in most cases) a new grammatical structure, and then it’s explained in the next section of the chapter. The idea is that you figure out the basic/probable meaning from reading, and then it’s explicitly presented to you afterwards.
One of the weaknesses of Athenaze is that it crams a lot into two volumes, and there really isn’t enough provided in terms of practice. The Italian edition apparently rectifies this by giving you extra readings and activities, but I don’t own it so can’t comment from personal experience.
I am not sure that the advice offered here amounts to a recommendation not to do any translation.
Certainly mwh advises you to develop a habit of reading without translation but that doesn’t mean you should never translate anything. It means reading and translating are different activities. It is possible if you have sufficient understanding of grammar to read sentences where you don’t know the vocabulary but you understand how the sentence is put together. It then becomes a simple task to use the dictionary to come with the meaning. I find students base their understanding on their knowledge of vocabulary and grammar limps in when all the possibilities of arranging the words has failed. Not being tied to instantly come up with an English version frees you to discover more about how a sentence works. This of course requires patience and one needs to accept that the goal is understanding not a translation.
That said translation is a skill we all need if we are to talk about texts with other people as mwh makes clear. It’s also a skill one has to learn and practice I don’t think it comes naturally to most students.
Nor do I think “brute memorisation” is very effective. What you need is a clear statement of the point of grammar you are trying to learn and plenty of examples. Exercises reinforce what you learn but identifying examples in the text you are reading is very helpful.
Having taught Latin with Familia Romana I have to say that no student has ever been able to work out the grammar from the text without help. I think if you were to have several lessons a week with a teacher you might work some things out but I think for the lone learner it’s pie in the sky.
I think there are many paths to getting the input you need. The key is to get the practice reading done so that it becomes automatic. Think back to when you learned to read English. The normal way is to teach children to decode words using phonics to sound them out. At first, this is a painfully slow conscious process, but with practice it becomes automatic. It became fashionable for a time to skip the phonics and go straight to learning whole words, and literacy suffered.
I believe that grammar translation has been maligned because many never reach the stage of practice through extensive reading. Some schools take 2 years to work through Wheelock before they get to the reading. That’s too long to go without.
If the reader you’re using isn’t enough, you can always use Athenaze, Thrasymachus, James Turney Allen’s First Year of Greek, etc. as a follow up reader to solidify your gains. That’s my 2 cents
