Would anyone here be interested in practicing spoken Attic Greek over a Skype conference call, on Sundays perhaps?
I know that this is being done; I know that it has been done in the past. I have done it several times over the years. Bedwere and I did it for a while both over Skype and, when that was having technical glinches, over cell phones. I concluded that scheduling these things in real time just didn’t work for me. If something came up at the last minute, and it often did, I wanted to be free to cancel. Greek for me is a hobby that needs to be fun, and when you have to be somewhere at a given time, it begins to feel like work. Plus, you should know that my experience has been that speaking Greek in real time requires intense concentration and again feels a little too much like work for me. (Louis Sorensen said that was his experience at Buth’s work shop, while it was very helpful, it was also very draining.)
So, I concluded that it would work better to use Voice Thread
https://voicethread.com/myvoice/#thread/5467767/27797517/38213506
where you can leave asynchronous messages in Greek at one’s convenience. Paul Nitz and I did this regularly for a while, but even then I found that speaking in Greek just takes more time and effort than writing in Greek or listening to Greek, so after a while it peetered out.
But, having said all this, I still think speaking Greek, including in real time, is vital for deeper internalization, and I for one would like to do some more of this. (I hope to get together with Bedwere next month when he comes to Boulder and speak a little Greek face to face, which is the best of all.) I think the key on-line is to make it as convenient as possible, to allow people to drop in and out as time allows, without having to commit. Also, the technology needs to be simple and user friendly.
Now, I think that Joel and Roberto are in fact doing some of this now, but maybe not on Skype, but on Google, which may be more convenient? (The last time I used Skype you had to download a bunch of stuff, which would not work right now on the computer I am using.)
So, I’m in if you can make it convenient. Obviously it will be more convenient if you get more people, so the key would be to stream line the efforts, find out who is doing this on what forums and join forces. (I think Evan D. also is involved in this.)
Joel and Roberto and Paul and Evan need to weigh in on this.
Joel and I speak for half an hour once a week, if we can. We both live in California, so we find it convenient to speak at 20:00 local time. We started with Google , but then my Linux box had problem with it an switched to Skype. Now the problems are solved, but we continue to use Skype.
Something for you to consider:
- Keep it short (half an hour, without being Draconian
). It’s better to conclude when people would like to continue that when they are bored. - Have some kind of theme, game, reading. For example, Joel and I read Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods with Rouse’s notes.
- Attic Greek sounds good, but don’t be a purist if somebody uses other forms.
I’m happy to do Skype conversations with anyone who would like to. Email me at jeidsath@gmail.com if you are interested. Bedwere’s Greek is much better than mine.
My preference, if not speaking with someone much better than me, would be to go through the oral conversation lessons in Rouse’s First Greek Course. Another good exercise might be to retell a short story from memory. And finally, explaining a story from a book, answering questions in Greek until everything is understood would be a great exercise.
On the other hand, I find that Bedwere hand I have been able to communicate a great deal in Greek, despite our limitations.
Joel, thank you for the compliment, although I don’t agree with it.
I’m always interested in having an online oral Greek exchange. But I have to agree with Markos that it is difficult. Voice Thread is a powerful, simple, free tool that we enjoyed. It has a very easy Iphone App from which you can listen to and post audio.
I would enjoy doing another Voice Thread exchange with anyone. After learning a bit about Deliberate Practice lately, I’d be inclined to use one Thread for focusing on a particular area, e.g., participles or conditional sentences or all the nuances of the Genitive.
We might post a picture, name a topic or story that we’ll talk about to give the participants some direction.
If two or more are interested, I’ll set it up.