Sometimes I wonder how much difference the method in language learning makes. In my dabbling with various languages, I’ve tried different approaches, and the main thing seems to be the effort I put in plus constant exposure. And then I think of the teaching of French here, which is mandatory from grades 3 to 9, and yet most people learn very little. I was fortunate enough to be enrolled in a French immersion program, and again I think the difference was just the constant exposure to French (half my school day was in French). I’m not even sure how important it was for me to produce French (I understand in the communicative method, there’s a lot of emphasis on having the student speak in the target language) – my French has really improved since I finished high school, almost ten years ago, but I’ve had very few opportunities to actually use French, but I read and watch tv and it just improves. My experience with (Ancient) Greek is similar, where I’m usually not a big fan of speaking/writing in Greek because I have doubts about the genuineness I can achieve, but the more passive exposure I get, the better my Greek gets. There are a couple sites, antimoon.com for learning English and http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com for learning Japanese, that emphasize high-quality input and think it’s better to say nothing at all than to say things with mistakes (which would seem to go against both the communicative and grammar-translation method), and a lot of it rings true for me.
And if that’s true, a seminary would be a perfect place for constant exposure to Greek. You can have services in Greek, daily bible readings in Greek, miracle plays in Greek. There’s all sorts of things you can do to expose students to Greek and it’ll be helpful even if they don’t fully understand. There was another thread here about listening to Greek, and I mentioned how helpful to me it was growing up hearing Greek in church, so that even without my doing anything, a lot of stuff just sank in, and when I went ahead and started learning Greek, certain things just felt right or felt wrong even though I couldn’t tell you why in terms of grammar. But I learned Greek going through Mastronarde’s, which is basically as grammar-translation as it gets, and I really liked it, although I don’t think I’d have the patience to work through it now.
I also agree with the point that if you can only read the Bible in Greek then you don’t know Greek. Knowing Greek means you can pick up any work in Greek and read it like you would something written in your native languages – that’s certainly my long-term goal. To be honest, I would suspect that if you can only read the Bible, which is most likely a book you know very well in another language, how much reading Greek are you doing? The point was made that people should read things beside the Bible – I think that learners should probably read anything but the Bible and only come to the Bible when they know Greek well enough to be reading the Greek instead of reading the translation they know well into the Greek, if you know what I mean.
And yeah, you should certainly know how to say basic things in Greek, but is “yellow” really that basic? I don’t know much about colour terms in Ancient Greek except that they’re very different. What would “yellow” be? ξανθός? χλωρός? something else?
), but even with the Greek, I can get the gist of what’s being said, I can identify the words even if I don’t know what they all mean, and this happens in real time. I honestly believe that if I put more time and effort into it and got more exposure, I should be able to understand things with only the rare problem. (I make no claims for Classical Greek, which I imagine would me much more difficult, but I would assume that it too can be done – I imagine for example that educated Byzantines spoke in an Atticizing Koine and understood each other.)