The need for comprehensible input is something that has often debated yet I am still unclear as to why people disagree or even if they disagree. If you have time please post your reasons along with your vote.
Although my experience learning Greek is very limited, I think more comprehensible reading material would be great!
I’m convinced comprehensible input is necessary in order to truly learn a language partly because my ability to understand Latin really took off after I started reading the language extensively using LLPSI, Harrius Potter, and other easy reading materials. Such easy reading did so much more for me than four years of grammar instruction and translation exercises. My experience learning modern foreign languages (English and Spanish) is also very similar.
I have no reason to believe this would be any different for Greek.
Because I read the texts of classical authors slowly I forget as quickly as I learn. Graded readers that exist I have either read or are so hard for me to be not really easier than actual authors. I have really given up learning Greek. After a break I have begun again to read a bit of Greek every day but not in the hope of mastering the language but solely not to completely lose what I have learned.
My problem may be my age but if not, I feel that the availability of a good selection of graded readers is the only thing that would enable me to progress.
Good to see you back on the forum, Daivid.
Bedwere’s L2 paraphrases and Direct Method illustrations of Aesop’s fables
http://discourse.textkit.com/t/topic/14194/1
are for me a model of how Greek should be learned.
I didn’t use it, but I looked at it in Foyles, and it looked very good: James Morwood (of “Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek” fame) “A Little Greek Reader”:
https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/a-little-greek-reader-9780199311729?cc=gb&lang=en&
The problem I see with that reader, Dante, is that it contains original texts, which, although they might be very suitable for translation practice, are surely too hard for fluent extensive reading by any but the most advanced students of Greek.
I’m working with jaihare on the Athenaze from Accademia Vivarium Novum which is essentially a graded reader of sorts. The original Athenaze was meant to be like a graded reader but the readings for each chapter are extremely short so I don’t feel like they cover enough material and repeat words enough to really sink in as best as I would like. The revision from Accademia Vivarium Novum has significantly more dialogues (Chapter 4 has about 20 pages of Greek readings) although the notes pages are in Italian. In addition Luigi Miraglia was kind enough to “Oerberg-ize” the Italian Athenaze so that it contains lots of useful pictures throughout. Much more vocabulary is introduced too compared to the English edition. Most of the key notes are exactly the same as in the English edition of Athenaze so having both copies can be helpful.
I have a long way to go but by my estimate between both books you would have about 300 pages of Ancient Greek materials including some content which is directly from classical authors.
It may not be perfect for everyone and it is a reasonably challenging course (in my opinion) but very worthwhile. I have created flashcards for new vocabulary and have been making my own audio of the dialogues using a pronunciation close to Erasmian (probably not perfect but good enough for me) and am finding it to really help internalize the content well.
I should think that anyone who has worked through a textbook like Mastronarde’s would be able to use this, preferably with a teacher, of course.
Graded readers are either for those working without a teacher at all or for those who do have a teacher but want to do some extra study on their own. My own experience of being taught is that when a teacher explains it everything is clear but when I return to the same text later the text has become again opaque.
The price was $20, so upon seeing a reasonably priced text from OUP, I bought it out of principle. I have found Morwood’s dictionary useful, though it goes slightly too far in cutting out the cruft. An expanded version with more notes on construction and inline principle parts would be appreciated. His grammar is nearly perfect for review, though I would recommend Kaegi’s first. Again, it’s a case of cutting out slightly too much. But that’s still better than putting too much in.
Morwood’s A Little Greek Reader looks very good, and I plan to read through it. It’s organized topically around things like Adjectives, Result Clauses, or Indirect Questions, to give some random examples. He has a nice grammatical explanation at the beginning of each section, along with notes, and a vocabulary at the end (given his dictionary, I’m sure it’s good). I’ve posted elsewhere about how useful I find Sidgwick’s examples of Greek constructions. Morwood’s extracts are less tightly focused than Sidgwick’s examples, being longer, and Morwood does not take pains to explain exactly how each extract demonstrates the grammatical principle, but it strikes me as something that would be useful to read through multiple times, until each section is known by heart.
On the other hand, it’s certainly not a graded reader, as Daivid says. But if he wants to start a translation thread based on it, I’d certainly do my best to provide what commentary I could.
The topical organization is the best part of it but to get this he has to select odd snippets. Not being able to read the full story or even a whole episode is quite demotivating. This is exacerbated by the very diverse selection of writers.
A specially written piece can focus on one grammatical topic without being so disjointed.
A good commentary does save me from getting stuck but it is the initial reading that makes it far too hard for me and that part has to be done without help.
Sooo, against many reservations I’ve decided to form part of the debate.
First and foremost, all the following comments and suggestions that I’ll make are only valid IF a radical change in the methodology is implemented (it’s irrelevant if you are a self-taught learner or a student in a university or high school course).
I strongly believe that the first step into a more effective learning (and teaching) of Greek (or any other language for that matter) is to completely abandon that outdated, boring, unappealing and ineffective methodology of torturing the pupil with “morphological-syntactical analysis” and “translation” of Greek phrases into English, and forcing him to memorize tables upon tables of declensions and looking into the dictionary for every single word he does not understand.
We should under no circumstances present the pupil with intricate “translation methods” that are eerily reminiscent of solving a Sudoku Puzzle. Teaching languages is not teaching math and we should not treat it as such. We should endeavour to teach languages (yes, even dead languages) the natural way (that is the same way we learn our mother tongue). One only need look into how modern languages are taught and imitate it. The best example of this is Ørberg’s Lingua Latīna per sē illūstrāta and Arthur M. Jensen’s Nature Methods for modern languages (Do read the prefaces of Mr. Jensen’s English by the Nature Method or indeed the preface of any of Mr. Jensen’s courses, Ørberg’s own justification and defence of the method should be enough to convince the sceptics).
If we follow these didactic principles, we’ll conclude that there is no need to torture the pupil with “translations exercises” or “morphological analyses” or any such nonsense. If we let the pupil kindly and gradually “discover” the grammatical rules with the aid of images, synonyms or slightly varied sentences in the context of a meaningful and coherent “story” in which he can infer the meaning of the new words, and above all repetition and imitation, then the pupil will have no trouble understanding the systematic and theoretical explanation of a grammar with its tables and its verbose linguistic jumble since he already knows what the text says.
Instead of translating decontextualised and random phrases into English the pupil should UNDERSTAND the meaning of the phrases in a MEANINGFUL context, if necessary, answer questions “Reading Comprehension-style” (Questions in GREEK and answers also in GREEK), then try and use what he already knows to say or write (still in GREEK) that same answer in another way, with synonyms or phraseology or different word order, etc. When the pupil has enough Greek on his back he should try and translate small phrases of English INTO Greek (never the other way around) and eventually try his hand in composition but only after he has had a good taste of real Greek (Plato and Xenophon being the best for starters). Cf. Prof. Thomson’s article quoted below.
This method is real, effective and every year dozens and dozens of pupils from around the world archive an active and competent command of Greek and Latin at the Vivarium Novum Academy using it. You can find a lot of testimonies of successfull implementation of the method here, here and here. (More complete bibliographies are available in the Latīnē doceō book, the Spanish version is free online).
Those clarifications aside, I’ll make a little list of the good materials that already exists and point out briefly what I think their deficiencies are along and my thoughts and rambles.
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I’ve already reviewed Prof. Zuntz’s Griechischer Lehrgang, which I consider to be the best method for Greek available and pointed out its flaws in the mentioned review and in other posts where I suggested many other materials. Although it is not stricto sensu a graded reader it can be perfectly used as such, it has the advantage of containing almost only “real Greek” instead of the “home-grown” or “home-made” Greek that Professor Zuntz so despised. Its Grammatical companion and vocabulary are of exceptional help and its proposed exercises do provide the perfect opportunity and encouragement to engage in the reading and comprehension questions I mentioned, as well as composition and review. Its only flaw (in my humble opinion) is that it’s still too attached to the old “grammatical-analysis” method or at least it can prove very tempting to fall into that nightmarish methodology or its evil twin the “translation method”. That aside the lack of an answers sheet can prove disturbing to the self-taught learners.
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I’ve also already praised the Italian version of the Athenaze in the mentioned review and post (The original English version has been so thoroughly surpassed by the Italian version that I cannot conceive of any reason to consult it other than the inability to read Italian, the English Workbooks however do offer some utility). It is by far the best (although still not perfect) implementation of the Nature Method for the teaching of Greek, it’s comparable to Ørberg’s Lingua Latīna per sē illūstrāta in depth, quality and friendliness to the pupil. Along with its exercise books, it forms a very good learner’s package, it includes a summary of the grammar and each chapter has an Enchiridion (or explanation), exercises and a vocabulary. It does lack an answer’s sheet, but the only real flaw that it may have is that a great deal of the first volume is not “original Greek”, that must be admitted, but in defence of the books I call not only on Prof. Miraglia’s thorough knowledge of Greek but on the expertise, experience and unrivalled competence of the people who revised and corrected Miraglia’s Greek, among others: Prof. Dr. Herwig Görgemanns and Prof. Enrico Renna. The second volume is practically an anthology of original Greek so Prof. Zuntz’s criticisms of “home-grown” Greek do not apply.
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Peckett & Munday’s Thrasymachus: A New Greek Course has already been reviewed by Prof. Zuntz in the articles quoted below, so I omit further comment other than the praise on its (at the time, unequalled) innovatory conception, it has been surpassed by the Athenaze.
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The celebrated Reading Greek of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers. It was this book’s popularity which ultimately defeated Prof. Zuntz’s attempts to publish his method in England and forced him to seek better luck elsewhere. Its a very, very good reader and method. It has the unrivalled advantage of being a living and thriving project so its under constant revision and edition. It has a very holistic approach best represented by its Independent Study Guide or its companion volume The World of Athens. It is the only other reader that can compete with Athenaze in its vividness and natural proclivity to be used according to the principles of the Nature Method. More thorough reviews of the method and its parts are available here, here, here, here, and here.
If Athenaze can claim that it passed Prof. Görgemanns’ punctilious examination, Reading Greek answers that the legendary Prof. Kenneth J. Dover is responsible for a great deal of the Greek text. So like with Athenaze I believe Prof. Zuntz’s reticence of “home-grown” Greek would be uncalled for in this case.
That’s it. There are of course other methods and readers (and several anthologies which might be used as readers). But I believe the best materials have already been mentioned, it is in no way little, but sadly none of the mentioned readers and methods its perfect on its own, so curiosity, good sense and discipline should come to rescue when one reader fails to reach someone’s expectations.
Buuuuut. I believe that deep down the problem is not so much as the lack of material what’s hurting Greek Studies, but the misuse (or incompetent use) of what we have available, specially with that appallingly infective methodology of “grammatical analysis” and “Greek to English translations”. (Again, read Prof. Thomson’s article)
What I do find lacking is enough reviews, criticism and feedback on the mentioned readers (or indeed any other method) with a “Nature method approach” for Greek. In Latin it would be impossible to numerate the didactic material, the praises, the testimonies, the suggestions that Ørberg’s method gets (that fact that I have to quote articles which deal more with Latin teaching than Greek because I could not find equivalents or suitable replacements speaks for itself).
There are also a lot of very good anthologies and selections of authors (for middle to advanced students), some of which I’ve mentioned before, that are a great help, if I had time (and motivation) I would write a comprehensive list of those I’ve used… In this department I find that the greatest obstacle is not the lack of good, user-friendly, thorough and competent material but the fact that much of the material available is almost always in German, Italian, Spanish, French or even Dutch and Russian and at times Polish; luckily a lot of it is in English, but sadly not enough.
Lastly I leave a promotional video for the Summer School at the Vivarium Novum and a list of videos of my friends and teachers SPEAKING coherent, elegant Latin as a proof of the enormous success and mastery of a dead language that can be archived if one uses a more human and living approach to teaching and learning the language. I hope that in a few years I might be able to find so many videos of people speaking Ancient Greek.
For further reading.
ZUNTZ, Günther. On Greek primers. Didaskalos 4.2 (1973) pp. 360-374 ZUNTZ, Günther. Griechischer Anfängerunterricht - Gestern, heute und morgen. Der altsprachliche Unterricht. Reihe XVII, Heft 5 (1974) pp. 41-64 ZUNTZ, Günther. Linguistics and the Teaching of Greek. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1973/1974), pp. 381-400.
ZUNTZ, Günther. On First Looking into Chase and Phillips: Notes on the Teaching of Beginners’ Greek. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 362-373.
BROOKS, E. J. Directa methodus. The Classical Review, Vol. 41, No. 6 (Dec., 1927), pp. 209-211
THOMSON, Ian. The Nature Method of Latin Instruction at Indiana University. The Classical World, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Nov., 1972), pp. 148-157
THOMSON, Ian. Further Thoughts on the Nature Method. The Classical World, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Sep., 1976), pp. 9-15
RIMBAULT, Olivier. Au sujet de la méthode de latin du Professeur Ørberg (Remarques sur la didactique des langues anciennes). Réflexion(s), avril 2012 (http://reflexions.univ-perp.fr/). Or here.
I’ve been reading through the first chapters of Zuntz, and enjoying it. I’ve noticed some errors, major and minor, in the English translation, but nothing that ruins the utility.
Yes, please send me the “On Greek primers” article. My email address is jeidsath@gmail.com. I assume this is where he discusses Thrasymachus?
The lack of very simple Ancient Greek stories is a problem. All of the graded readers mentioned in this thread are far, far too difficult for a beginner. For normal learners, the best promise for developing a facility in Ancient Greek is to follow a course of study that would a) be based on a graded reader; b) be used together with communicative methods. Those methods for autodidacts would be far different than used in face to face classrooms, but the principles remain the same. A learner must confront the language AS COMMUNICATION, as a true communicating language. He must be communicated to in the language and at some point he must communicate to someone with the language.
It would be wonderful if we had “See Jane run” books in authentic Ancient Greek. We don’t. Composed Greek can fill the gap and will not “harm” a learner.
Among adults, explicit grammatical explanations, grammatical labels, comparisons with other languages, memorization of lists, etc. can be useful, but they should always follow confronting the language as communication.
The Natural Method and Direct Method were reactions to the Grammar Translation method and have many good features. However, they are seriously dated. For example, the strict directions of the Direct Method to ONLY use the target language has been shown to be an unnecessary restriction and the requirement to give target language output from day one is suspected to be a hindrance to learning (at the very least, raising the affective filter).
Comprehensible Input and forced output are good theories, but incomplete. The key in instruction or self-teaching is making the language truly serve as a tool for communication.
That’s actually the kind of criticism that I’ll like.
Partially agree. I concede that sadly not even the Athenaze completely archives the natural easiness of Ørberg’s Lingua Latīna per sē illūstrāta or any of Jensen’s Natural Methods (hence the necessary notes). But is there any possible alternative?
Keep in mind that while I wholeheartedly agree with you in that the language’s prime objective, environment and method is living communication, Ancient Greek has the unfortunate disadvantage that unlike Latin it was not “revived” as a communicative language until well into the Renaissance, and even after that it never reached even a significant fraction of Latin’s wide usefulness and popularity. So while do we have a tradition of “conversational Ancient Greek” (cf. Gretserius’ Quattuor dialogi ex Progymnasmatis Jacobi Pontani, Societatis Jesu, Graece redditi, Posselius’ Οἰκείων διαλόγων βιβλίον seu familiarium colloquiorum libellus Graece et Latine, or many others), it sadly never archived enough devotees and raw new material with which to establish itself as a revived language on its own legs, thus there is not enough of “real” or “authentic” (or “prestigious” if you like) Greek on which to fall on when trying to made a graded reader in most elemental of beginner’s level.
The valiant efforts of a Blackie seem to me (as you said), too complicated for beginners and options like Joannides are I believe too far away from actual written Greek to be of any use. Because IF there is any value in learning Ancient Greek (or Latin) it is to read the ORIGINAL AUTHORS, as Prof. Zuntz repeats over and over, and sadly because those original authors did not left enough “beginners material” (and we have a very small, vague and oft-times questionable if not frankly made up material from our humanist tradition of dialogues) all attempts to reconstruction are doomed to become difficult like Blackie’s Dialogues or mere curiosities like Joannides’ book. And in both cases the “living” and “communicative” part of the effort is blatantly artificial. Both the Athenaze or the Reading Greek are what I consider to be the most accurate, successful, sensible and useful effort in composing Greek for beginners which can simultaneously be called “living” and “communicative” and accurate and respectful of the ancient Greek Language and Literature.
In summary: The cruel contradiction between the subject’s objective (reading ancient authors) and the best and natural method of learning a language (communicating actively) puts even the most competent and well meaning professor in a dilemma. I stand with Zuntz (and Miraglia for that matter) in his belief that writing and speaking Ancient Greek (or Latin) is not and should not be the objective, not even a priority, but a means to optimize the whole teaching-learning process.
Lastly… I know (my students and teachers and friends have proven over and over) that even if Athenaze and Reading Greek are not perfect in terms of simplicity and friendliness for beginners with a little patience and dedication the first obstacles are surpassed without mayor trouble.
It does not have to, but depending on the quality of the material, the competence of the teacher or even the gullibility and naiveté of the pupil it can and of-times does (Zuntz has a more pessimistic and rigorous opinion, and I admit that his arguments are compelling). Like I said, both the Athenaze and the Reading Greek can easily pass but the most exaggerated and punctilious of scrutiny thanks to the mastery and competence of the great scholars who diligently worked (and still work) in its composition and improvement.
Can you provide evidence for that? I agree that SOME sort of compromise must be made at the very beginning, specially if the pupil has difficulties. But I simply cannot imagine a better way to learn a language, any language, as total immersion.
When a child learns his mother tongue it does so only by observation, repetition and imitation. No matter how ungifted the pupil may be if you point to a red car and say “Das rote Auto” he’ll get it, and it will only be a matter of minutes until he somehow gets “Ich habe das rote Auto”, with the help of an actual car and patience he’ll even get the gist of “Ich sitze in dem roten Auto” in a short time. It falls on the teacher (or the method) to variate that into “Das blaue Auto”, “Das große Auto”, “Das kleine Auto”, and slowly add more words, structures, etc. (It is sadly this kind of easy, elemental language, which we can only replicate in the case of Greek, and even when done successfully and accurately, its usefulness to reading ancient Greek Authors is not always assured). Another good example are the innumerable cases of people who learnt English (and good, understandable, and sometimes elegant English) playing videogames.
If the success of the Vivarium Novum and its friends and followers around the world (like Prof. Tunbergs’ and Minkova’s institute) is not enough evidence to the effectiveness of the natural method, I’ll only point to the thousand year old successful humanistic tradition in Europe and elsewhere which archived such glorious success with its total Latin (and sometimes Greek) immersion that until well into the 20th Century you could find theses, homeworks, discourses and books written in the most elegant Latin, by all sorts of pupils; even when they did not adhere strictly to many of the didactic principles of the nature method other than the total immersion in the language. (Think of Rimbaud’s, or Wilde’s, or Nietzsche’s and Marx’s works written in Latin (or in Greek)).
don’t forget that something like 60% of English vocab comes from Latin, either directly or through French, whereas only 4% comes from Greek. Thats one of the reason’s why an approach like Orberg’s works so well for native English speakers. It is doubtful that the same approach would work as well in Greek.
No one ever said learning Greek was easy. JACT’s Reading Greek is probably about as close as you’re going to get to a “natural” approach.
2 questions:
But doesn’t avoiding made up group lead to exercises of decontextualised sentences or extracts or texts that are far too difficult for a learner?
Why does Zuntz so despise made up Greek? He his not alone but every time I encounter such contempt it is clear that the writer considers such contempt so axiomatic to require no justification.
Yes, Prof. Zuntz is painfully aware of this fact (cf. his articles, specially his On Greek Primers and Griechischer Anfängerunterricht - Gestern, heute und morgen). His “solution” was at the beginning to group those phrases in subjects and to add an anthology (the gradation itself is well done). Take a look at his method and read his Vorwort and judge for yourself if he accomplished what he intended.
I do honestly believe that his method is the best but not the pedagogical ideal (mainly because of this reason), which is why (as I said in the review and elsewhere) I always use his method in combination with a graded reader. And we must also remember he lived in a time where an elite group of people (to which Prof. Zuntz belonged) got an unimaginable amount of classical knowledge at home and very early in school, so its not surprising that he supposed that any teacher (or parent) would be knowledgeable enough to first introduce the learner to the context of the fragments and explain their importance so that they made sense and aroused the interest of an already advanced school boy. (Understanding this privileged position of the greatest scholars of the past century is something that some teachers or scholars today fail to do and end up making impossible demands to a new and totally different generation of students).
Again, Zuntz himself in his articles answers this precise question better than anyone else, and like I said, his arguments are compelling. We also have to understand that he lived in a time where the good materials I’ve mentioned were virtually unknown, extremely new or not yet existent, which is why he pronounced his judgements based on his observations of the material he had at hand, which is very, very bad, disastrous and honestly depressing (cf. Zuntz’s On First Looking into Chase and Phillips: Notes on the Teaching of Beginners’ Greek and Linguistics and the Teaching of Greek). So I can understand why he looked with suspicion those methods that resembled the useless ramble that he knew.
I don’t disagree, and I confess that I’m quite fond of the Reading Greek, like I said its holistic approach makes it very attractive (the answers sheet alone must be a heavenly deliverance to self-taught learners), the Independent Study Guide or the The World of Athens are irreplaceable enticements to the curiosity of the pupils.
But if push came to pull I’d stick with Athenaze because the JACT is not “ørbergian” enough, proof of this is that I’ve encountered pupils and teachers who, having such an excellent reader fall on trap of focusing more on the English explanations and the technicalities of the grammar notes rather than on the excellent text itself. Or even worse, they end up doing this whole torture of morphological analysis and translation into English which kills the whole purpose of a graded reader. (Again, read Prof. Thomson’s article)
Maybe I’m wrong but I get the feeling that (not only here) there’s an “English language bias” were a lot of excellent material is ignored at best or “discriminated” at worse simply because it’s written in a language other than English.
My own road to Greek was reading the Anabasis, Rouse’s Greek Boy, and the book of Mark, aloud a million times until they made sense. I followed it up with 2 years (so far) of grammar studies and a lot of reading.
Having done the same with other languages now, I have to say that the thing that is really missing from Greek studies is good audio recordings. Not every part of a word’s sound is set down in any written language. For German, for example, the tone and vocal inflection of a word is every bit as important in signaling the genitive as is the word-form itself. It is impossible for non-fluent readers to make useful audio materials. They just read what is on the page. To get to the level where you can read something aloud usefully, you should be able (at the least) to retell that story in your own words, in the original language. And even to adapt and explain the original as you go. The current creators of Greek audio just aren’t at that point yet. But they are getting there.
Once there are such audio materials in quantity, it’s going to be much easier to pick up Ancient Greek. Ideally it will exist for all of the major graded readers, and every Greek text.
English/Greek interference or German/Greek interference is something to be avoided, but it’s not the end of the world to encounter it every so often in your learning career. There just isn’t enough of a bad-Greek speaking community out there for a pidgin to develop like you see with English. (A relative of mine heard a lecture in Tibet on how there are more “new English” speakers in the world than “old English.” By new English, he meant non-native English. And this was the reason, so said the lecturer, that he didn’t teach his students any grammar. There is no danger of that with ancient Greek.) Reading lots of different graded readers until you don’t need them anymore seems like a fine thing to me. The ones mentioned in this thread are all great, JACT, Athenaze, Zuntz, and Thrasymachus. I’ve mentioned my favorites in other threads.
He is very damning on Chase and Phillips but doesn’t give any reason as to why writing good simple made up Greek is impossible. It is likely ( as you suggest) that his reasoning is that “because all made up Greek I have encountered so far is bad it is impossible to do better” but he doesn’t actually say so.
That certainly does not follow, if that is his reasoning. If it is possible for someone today to detect when a section of made up Greek is bad Greek it is possible for the same person to write good Greek. And if their are aspects of Ancient Greek that are too subtle for most expert scholar to pick up on it will be too subtle for any learner to pick up on when reading real Greek.
It strikes me that reading through his description of what a Ancient Greek textbook should be that Polis is pretty close to his ideal - except that Christophe Rico uses made up Greek.