Giving a reasonable instead of one's best effort at reading unadapted Greek?

Greek Learning Greek
1

I’ve seen a lot of sometimes conflicting advice on getting lots of comprehensible input, mostly in the form of adapted Greek, versus tackling wild Greek as soon and often as possible. I’m not nearly good enough yet to recognize when adapted phrasing is not idiomatic (other than in my own English → Greek translations, where it is very obvious that I just slotted Greek words in an English sentence structure), and I don’t want to down the road have difficulty comprehending typical Greek word order, participial constructions, etc. At the same time, I see the value in getting lots and lots of easy Greek.

I’m wondering - is it a harmful practice to mostly tackle wild Greek but not beat my head against the wall until I can parse every single part of the passage? I’ve been taking short passages from Xenophon and Plato (was doing from Greek NT but it’s too easy to back-translate) and putting a reasonable effort into understanding the gist if not every single nuance of it, then checking the Loeb translation. Maybe 40% of the time I’m dead on, 40% of the time I got the gist correct but missed some details, and 20% I’m way off base (like thinking the subject was someone it was not).

Can I get your thoughts on whether putting a reasonable, but not my best, effort at understanding wild Greek, then checking the translation and moving on, will hurt me in the long run?

Thanks!

2

No, it will benefit you. This was me with Latin. Exposure is exposure.

Also, this used to be a pretty standard part of pedagogy. Look up delecti, these were lists of digestible sentences categorised by morpho-syntactical function (e.g “here’s 100 sentences with genitive absolutes”). They were meant to help the transitioning reader.

You’re reading practice should consist of, ideally, 1) Stuff adapted to your level 2) Stuff you strictly translate 3) General texts you have a go at now and then.

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Can I get your thoughts on whether putting a reasonable, but not my best, effort at understanding wild Greek, then checking the translation and moving on, will hurt me in the long run?

I would suggest trying to parse at least some of the Greek to see how it fits together, after you’ve checked the translation. I think this would be helpful. However, you should be aware that translating from Greek into idiomatic English usually requires a certain amount of rearrangement.

4

Once you have learned the paradigms, I can’t see the problem with trying to (morphologically) analyse everything you read. (That is, parse as you go.) That turns out to be why you read the paradigms in the first place - so you could cement them by checking they actually work. You need not worry about syntax as much till your morphology is more deeply set in your head. Of course you don’t really need to grasp “every single nuance” but surely your benchmark for that is different from the Loeb translator’s: yes, in my opinion, you shouldn’t be satisfied with a foggy idea of how the sentence fits together, coupled with its “correct” meaning in English as opposed to Greek, and then just move on. (Conversely, you don’t need to, and shouldn’t try to, understand everything deeply from a syntactical POV until a while after you’ve learned morphology, I’d say.) So you want to parse, know that so-and-so is an accusative absolute, etc., but you do not need to worry about how that accusative absolute is being used or why (beyond simply what it means). That is how I would do it, as a beginner who had just learned the paradigms.

Before you have learned the paradigms, I think perhaps just work relentlessly at doing so and don’t worry about reading until you have.(?) (I can only speak from my own experience, but since I did not make much of an effort with Greek till I was competent at Latin that may be different.)

It is true that “exposure is exposure” - in fact if your native language is English it wouldn’t even hurt to learn some Modern Greek for example - and your vocab will certainly improve by the method you describe, but your impression that collecting enough vocab will clear up the fog that currently clouds your mind’s eye as you read is mistaken - only a thorough grammatical foundation will dispel that mist.

As for “getting lots and lots of easy Greek”: it doesn’t sound like you are at the stage where Xenophon or Plato is very ‘comprehensible’ input, if you not only need a Loeb to clear up the meaning but in fact it’s often not even clear after that. So I don’t think the arguments from the CI camp apply here. Maybe if you were reading one of those Greek readers we’d have a different conversation but you’ve chosen to go down the ‘real Greek’ route. No - backwards-fudging a Loeb translation onto a sentence you didn’t understand before is not ‘comprehensible input’.

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Memorizing paradigms is probably secondary to seeing each form used in intelligible sentences a hundred times (and creating your own correct sentences). Simply memorizing the table of forms and being able to repeat it winds up being far less useful than you’d imagine.

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Thanks for the replies!

Callisper - I probably should have given more context in my query. At the same time, I’m working through every exercise in Mastronarde, and there I make sure that I completely grasp the forms and syntax of every reading. I agree - clearly Xenophon and Plato are above my current capacity and so are not comprehensible input (other than being made comprehensible by translation), but I find it motivating to re-visit texts that I want to be able to read in the near future, and seeing how much more of it I can understand after having worked through some more units of Mastronarde. Does that make sense? So a few weeks ago, I had a foggy idea of what a participle was and could tell “well this is a participle of this verb modifying this noun and it’s probably aorist,” but now after having done the units on participles, I can usually nail down what kind of participle it is and how it’s functioning in the sentence. So that is kind of cool to see the percentage I’m comprehending of unadapted Greek increase as my bookmark moves forward through Mastronarde. And as Joel said, seeing words used in context really helps me to remember them.


Joel - yes I’m already discovering this!


Scribo - that makes sense. I do 2 and 3 a lot and find it hard to be motivated enough to do much of 1. I know in theory reading more at and beneath my ]level would be salutary.

Hylander - Yep, I do that! Kind of like working forwards and backwards in a proof. I try to understand as much as I can on my own without undue effort, and then check the translation and reverse-engineer it.

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@ exorcist - sounds good.

I’ll clarify that by “learning the paradigms” I didn’t mean “memorizing the table of forms and being able to repeat it” like a parrot. You have to learn to use/recognise those forms. This may go one of two ways - (1) memorize the tables, and then parse a lot of text (in the context of reading of course); or (2) parse a lot of text (in the context of reading), so you get used to the forms, then memorize the tables. Better than parsing (either route) is composition.

My warning is as usual directed at those who are looking for short-cuts that do not exist, and at the idea that some large volume of ‘immersion’ can compensate on an unconscious level for clarity of thought and precision when it comes to morphological knowledge and parsing. That is why I urged the OP to parse.

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Wild Greek :question:

It’s all Greek to me. :slight_smile:

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What is wild Greek?

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Parsing? Is that ever more than 10% of the marks on an exam now?

There was a fashion for parsing a very long time ago. Perhaps it was back when we used slide rules and tables of logarithms for complex calculations. But now, … there are computers to aid in that.

Further back, memorization was the fashion.

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Native speakers learn the language from childhood. Their language develops in tandem with their cognitive abilities. They achieve that without grammars or dictionaries.

The translation is the context in which the Greeek is intelligible. CI is not limited to sensory inputs, intellectual contexts also work. “Comprehensible” and “input” can be on different occasions. Comprehensibility may take a few readings to achieve, and input (augmentation to or clarification of some point or relationship in the system of the language) may take place gradually and the various pieces of input from a sentence may not add to the language together.

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Hi exorcist (sorry, but that’s weird!). A few years ago there was a wild and woolly thread on Textkit about the quality of, and the value of reading, for purposes of becoming fluent, “made-up” Greek (ancient Greek composed by moderns for entertainment or pedagogical purposes). In that thread, Joel (jeidsath), an advocate of such material, tongue-in-cheek and ironically expounded the dictum “read lots of junk!”. For ever after in dialog with myself I don’t have to waste two seconds of my life I’ll never get back saying “ancient Greek composed by moderns for entertainment or pedagogical purposes”, I just call it “junk” (not implying any judgement about its value). Now for its opposite, the unadapted Greek written by ancient authors, you have given me “wild Greek”. Thanks!

(That thread is partly a propos of your question here, but at the moment any search request I make is crashing my Textkit session - Joel?)

If I understand your trajectory correctly, it is this: You’re teaching yourself the fundamentals of ancient Greek primarily by methodically going through Mastronarde. This is a long and necessary haul, and to supplement your textbook, to keep yourself motivated, and probably sometimes just to satisfy your curiosity and sometimes just out of boredom, you’re occasionally trying your hand at wild Greek sentences you’re plucking out of the Loeb collection. You are potentially interested in reading some junk too, but are concerned it might be “harmful”. Hmmm, all this sounds familiar!

Here’s my 2 cents (sometimes repeating what others have said):

In my opinion, the junk is at the very least not harmful - it’s not going to lead to any bad habits. Whether or not it’s helpful, well, consult that thread I was talking about (again apologies that I can’t link to it at the moment) and decide for yourself.

ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος. Decades ago I learned Greek in college using the then venerable Crosby & Schaeffer. Each chapter in C&S begins with a motivational snippet of wild Greek, that one appropriately for the first chapter. One of the realities of learning Greek as an adult is that your mind is too curious to be content with forms and elementary syntax. In my opinion, it’s perfectly natural to occasionally sample some wild Greek to satisfy your curiosity about how well you can actually fare with the stuff at this juncture in your learning. But - and again, this is just my opinion - I wouldn’t try to incorporate it at this stage into my daily and weekly routine, or as a quasi formal method of learning Greek. Just read the sentence from Xenophon, see how well you do with it (sometimes you’ll be pleasantly surprised, sometimes momentarily and unnecessarily depressed), check the Loeb translation (or not) and move on, curiosity satisfied.

When you finally complete Mastronarde, you’ll face these questions all over again, as you decide for yourself how much “intermediate Greek” (junk or adapted wild Greek) you should read before jumping into the deep end. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach here. But that’s farther down your swimming lane than you’re asking about here.

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There was a CPU spike earlier, and you hit the execution timeout for search queries. If you’d like to send me the original search query I can look into it.

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(Randy to Joel:) Searching on “junk” yielded one, inapplicable hit (“junk Virgil”). Searching on “intermediate Greek readers” crashed my session, in multiple attempts over about twenty minutes.

You must know the thread I’m talking about. I think you created it by providing a list of the intermediate materials (junk) you were aware of, and off it went from there.

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I doubled the execution time limits, and it should work now.

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Thanks, Joel, that worked. Here is the thread I was referring to. My mistake, though, you (Joel) said “read lots of crap”, not lots of junk :laughing: .

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I have looked at Joel’s thread. It is a fair statement that such readers will not harm the Greek of a student at the OP’s stage.*

The problem is with the idea that this is the (or “a”) main thing to do to become better at Greek, in lieu of actual hardcore learning and memorization. As we discussed, that learning (once you have consigned yourself to memorization) then has to be applied to be cemented and transformed into actual linguistic competence; you can do that by rapid composition (as I did), or by reading - and here I suspect real ancient Greek is better than adapted or made-up, if only for the confidence it gives you that what you learned applies to your ultimate target too.

Joel’s case-studies are good. Notice how none of them involved individuals relying in the least on modern made-up Greek. It isn’t that they’re harmful. It’s that they aren’t particularly useful. The kind of familiarity they foster with the language patterns is not the key or primary thing that one needs to actually begin to be able to read Xenophon and Plato. The key and primary things are vocabulary and grammar. I don’t think learning vocabulary and grammar from reading it in made-up Greek is any easier than learning them from reading actual Greek, given that - to be sure - this learning needs to have a substantial conscious element anyway.

No case-studies will be found of someone (in the last 100 years) who just used ‘input’ until Greek sunk in and now is a comfortable reader of ancient Greek texts. The comparison ἑκηβόλος made to native languages is neither here nor there. If we subtract the adapted Greek and leave just the actual made-up Greek (which could be comprehensible input for genuine beginners, who are nowhere near the real texts yet), Joel’s little library must come to, what, 10,000 words? I do not think 10 million would achieve the result in question. Look at this news article: https://gb.education.com/magazine/article/30000_words/. 33 million words of input and 12 million words of spoken practice for the level of a good 3-year-old - and that’s if adults learn as easily as children. And how will the reborn 3-year-old you fare with your target, Thucydides? Next note that, as their conversation partners multiply growing up, and their skills do the same, both input and output will vastly increase. (This article - https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/the-american-diet-34-gigabytes-a-day/ - has a 100,000-word per day estimate for adult input.)


*Note the difference with my remarks on the modern Latin novels thread. There is a large discrepancy between novels (which can only be) pitched at students already capable of reading the original classics with equal ease, and yet riddled with astoundingly facile mistakes, generally horrible Latinity, and a complete failure to maintain or teach anything about classical norms, and readers - like thee - composed of lightly altered selections from Attic texts, or with original material sometimes by teachers (like Rouse) not nearly as incompetent as the authors of the aforementioned novels, and most importantly, clearly & successfully directed towards beginning students. Thus the difference is twofold: 1) the Greek of these readers is much better (at least the ones I looked at); 2) the present OP is (maybe) in a position to benefit from them, where he would not be in a position to benefit from novels even if they did exist translated into Greek. (An exception to be noted is the Harry Potter translation in Greek - it’s strong, stronger than any modern Latin translation I’ve seen, and stronger than Rouse - not sure I would recommend it to a beginner though.) Anyway this happy coincidence means these readers may be consumed without harm.

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I don’t know. I mainly used input Greek for my first year or two (after about one year noun cases began to sink in for me) and added more grammar studies over time. I can read Plato well enough now to follow the gist of the argument without a dictionary, in texts that I’ve never read before. The Bowen’s Advanced Unseens thread will give you an idea of my level of comprehension without looking up words. I feel that it’s pretty good for 5 years in, and it’s now good enough for me to pull down an OCT for my evening reading, which was my original goal with Greek. I’ve still got a long way to go, of course, and life intervenes quite a lot.

19

God I need to stop doing this. Years ago when I first opened a Gmail account I used my best friend’s name to troll her, and guess which email address I still use? In this case, I don’t know enough Greek yet to pick a cool Attic name that hadn’t already been taken, and I was tired, and The Exorcist is my favorite movie. So yeah. I don’t think I’m any weirder IRL than the median Textkit member.

I didn’t coin that term; I saw it I forget where. But glad you find it serviceable!

Exactly. And yes for all those reasons. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the two cents and the link to that thread! lol Joel - “crap Greek.”


I agree that made-up readers are highly unlikely to harm me at this stage. And I can see how they can be useful, at least to someone at my current level. There’s only so much Mastronarde I can hammer out in a day, but when my brain is tired it feels relaxing to read Aesop’s fables in made-up Greek. So I personally would not rely on made-up Greek to power my progress, but it’s a good way to get more exposure.

The ongoing discussion about the merits of made-up Greek vs. wild Greek reminds me of the debate in endurance sports about the merits of volume (mileage) vs. intensity. Minute-for-minute, the harder stuff is going to yield more benefit, but there’s a lower ceiling on how much of it one can do. Whereas each easy mile yields less benefit than each mile run hard, but you can run many more easy miles, and total volume might matter more in the long run. Everyone agrees (at least in running) that you need both volume and intensity, but the ideal mix is probably different for each individual and different for a particular individual at different points in time. I think it’s probably like that with reading made-up Greek vs. real Greek, at least in the beginning stages. (After a certain point, why would you bother to read Rouse if you can read Thucydides?)


ἑκηβόλος I agree with that. I don’t want all - or the bulk - of my CI to come from translation, but it’s an effective (if not καλός) method of making input comprehensible.

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That needn’t be so straightforward. In designing teaching and learning material, it is possible to programme the learners’ knowledge system to go directly from L2 to concepts. In other words, creating L2 memories to call upon when struggling with comprehension can be programmed. By deceiving oneself a little, it is possible to build up a body of conceptual memories. The key timing is about 3.5 seconds.

What I find works for disintermediating one’s L1 (English) from the conceptualisation of meaning in the target L2 is a quite simple slight of hand (mind). Take a simple but complete but complete meaning - complete enough to be “concretely” conceptualised. By that I mean that the concepts can take form in some way.

Take the phrase Οὐδὲν τῶν μελλόντων ὑποπτεύσας “suspecting nothing of the thing that were about to happen”. There are a number of different “concrete” images that you can form from that:
οὐδὲν “nothing”,
ὑποπτεύει “he suspects (something)”,
τὰ μέλλοντα “the things that are about to happen”,
ὑποπτεύσας “suspecting (while doing something else)”, ὑποπτεύει τὰ μέλλοντα “he suspects the things that are about to happen”,
ὑποπτεύσας τὰ μέλλοντα" suspecting the things that are about to happen (while he does something else)",
οὐδὲν τῶν μελλόντων “nothing of the things that are about to happen”,
οὐδὲν ὑποπτεύει “he has no suspicions whatever”,
οὐδὲν ὑποπτεύσας “suspecting nothing at all (while doing something else)”.
It us then possible to go laterally into “she suspecting”, “they suspect” etc.

Go through the minimal and reduced units (lowest common denominators and factors) of the target phrase with all the grammatical and lexical understanding you need. Make sure you are pronouncing them properly according to your adopted standard. Working with them may involve translation, or pictures or acting them out, imagining them happening to yourself or others you know or don’t know.

Once you are ready, use the limits of short term memory to create memories in Greek from and to the conceptualisation.

There is no one “method” or “technique” that works and others don’t, but here is one that I have had some success with. Declutter your mind in the way that people do. Repeat aloud the L2 word three times without thinking of concepts or meaning, say the L1 “meaning” internally (not aloud). Begin to think of visualisations of the concept (contexts familiar to you not spevifically targeting the text), while “physically” counting slowly to three. By “physically” counting , I mean extending fingers (1st, 2nd and 3rd) or touching shoulder, elbow then wrist. After those 3 seconds, the L1 (ie English) will begin to fade giving way to conceptual thinking. At that point query your ears for what they heard (ie the L2 Greek). You may then be building L2 to concept memories. Of course behave responsibly when you are reprogramming your own or others’ thinking. There is no need for cartoon style overly shockingv isualisations, though they might work best for you. Close up shop at the end too, with repetitions of the minimal and reduced units with the eyes closed to show how it worked, or just some normal conversation or something less intense than the mental workout that you have just been giving yourself. If it is a distressing process, try something else.

Creating (recreating) memories of past events or familiar concepts, people, things or places is tried and tested practice for teachers. Doing it so directly is not.

What I mean is that the “translation is the context” does not need to be that you simply look at the Greek after the translation and say, “Oh yeah, so that’s what it meant, huh.” There are imaginative ways to deal with it. Using the LEOB is good if you can factorise on your feet, so to speak, otherwise prepare by writing out the reduced units.

Actually, it is possible to programme and prepare people to comprehend just a particular target text, by doing something similar. Chain (ie. franchised) language training schools do that to raise the levels of customer satisfaction, and so increase their revenue stream. That is a clever use of this technique, but in a very reduced form.

Basically you need to programme yourself and / or your students to understand the minimal units (primes) and the combinations (ie reduced forms of the the target text) (factors), including the target text. The aim is to think sensibly in Greek with a sense that you have valid memories to compare the images in the text to.