When, long ago in a galaxy far away, I taught a course in history of education, in preparing the course, I encountered a teaching method called choral practice. That’s not choral in the sense of choir singing, but in the sense of chanting it together. It’s easy to imagine school children chanting their “ten-times-tables” (multiplication).
Imagine chanting together the Latin or Greek forms for not more than fifteen minutes each instruction period. Or for autodidacts, imagine a set of ten-minute video presentations. If I were preparing them on Greek nouns, first I’d learn-by-chanting a list of twenty or so model nouns. Then I’d take up one after the other each model and learn by chanting the forms for each model noun.
The video presentation could put the correct spelling on the screen. While slowly learning the forms, the students might start reading some very easy stuff. E.g, “Britannia est insula; America non est insula.” And so forth like that.
Does anybody know of such a series of choral practice videos in the ancient languages? I know about “The Great Courses” presentation of Greek 101. Hans-Friedrich Mueller did some choral practice work in these programs, and I found it quite helpful.
When I studied English as a foreign language, one type of exercise was named “listen and repeat”: words, structures and sentences were recorded by an instructor and offered on audio tapes together with the textbooks. Based on that experience, I made my own recordings and used them the same way, when I came to studying Greek. It is, I believe, similar to the choral chanting, only the choir is reduced to the level of a soloist.
Below is an example of such study material which I am now preparing using the first book of John. (I started my Greek study with the New Testament, and I was told that this text would be appropriate for a beginner).
There are three levels: “Beginner” (individual words), “Practice (1)”, “Practice (2)” (chunks of text, shorter first, then longer). I inserted pauses between words/chunks so that the student should be able to repeat after listening. Silent moments of appropriate lengths are also added at the end of each recording so that playing in loop may function as a continuous exercise.
I think it would be ideal if some of the most representative promoters of various pronounciation systems (e.g. Koine, Lucian, Restored Attic, Modern Greek) agreed to producing sample recordings of this kind on pieces of text that are considered representative for each ‘age’ of the language, and assembling them together in parallel within a common material. This would be, I guess, of significant help to autodidacts.