requirementS to attain reading proficiency in an inflected language IS perplexing me..
could anyone here share some method/s in learning paradigms especially the noun system?
I ask these because, the first Greek book I learned from is mounce, and he teaches that we should only to memorize the āpatternā and eight rules.
but I also aware that the pattern doesnt always work for the some groups of the 3rd declension noun.
At first It doesnt mind me much, until I decided to equip myself with JACT. this is because I think I am going to read not just the NT.
and JACT further classifies the 3rd declension into 8 subgroups, from a to h.
my question is, when one is learning Greek, does he REALLY need to memorize all the subgroups?
and should I write all the subgroups declension 100 times each?
is it necessary that way, or It is enough just to know the pattern and using the article as guide?
and when you encounter new nouns, does it help to know to which subgroup does it belong?
I used Mounce as my first text for Greek, but his text has many flaws. He seems to be trying to teach the bare minimum of Greek with the least possible amount of effort, which is indicative of the times. Mounceās text assumes the learners are only interested in reading Koine, and on top of that only the NT. In the long run you really do need to learn the subtypes, which may seem overwhelming at first, but itās not really that bad.
Now, how to go about doing that? You could sit down and write them all out 100 times as you said, which would probably work, but that sounds like torture to me. Iād much rather just read through the paradigms out loud while looking at the nicely formatted tables in a good text rather than my own handwritten chicken scratch. Iāve done this for learning paradigms and it works well for me, eventually a picture of the table burns itself into my memory. I donāt simply recite the paradigms though, I put them into very short sentences to burn the case form and function into my mind together. For instance: ĻĪæĪ»Ī¹Ļ ĪµĻĻĪ¹Ī½, ĻĪæĪ»Ī¹Ī½ ĪæĻĻ, ĻĪæĪ»ĪµĻĻ Ī²Ī±ĻĪ¹Ī»ĪµĻ Ļ, ĻĪæĪ»ĪµĪ¹ ĻĪ¹ĻĻĪµĻ Ļ, etc.
I donāt have Mounce, but I suspect learning the patternāthe basic endingsāand his 8 rules would probably be enough. I can almost guess what the rules are without seeing his text.
See if you can derive the 8 JACT patterns from the pattern and Mounceās rules. That would be a good exercise to help you learn how the 3rd declension works. Then learn the paradigms. If you learn the basic pattern and Mounceās rules first, that will help you master the otherwise perplexing proliferation of paradigms.
In any case, you will find that there are a number of common words that donāt completely fit the JACT paradigms in every detail, such as ĪŗĻ ĻĪ½ ĪŗĻ Ī½ĪæĻ. These irregularities you will have to learn as you learn the vocabulary items in question, but if you know the basic endings, these shouldnāt give much trouble. After youāve completed the basic work of learning the language, youāll probably forget the irregularities and maybe parts of the paradigms, too, until you encounter individual forms in reading, which will bring them back to you and reinforce them.
Ultimately you want to get to a level of reading where you recognize words and their grammatical roles without having to think about paradigms at all. Knowing the basic pattern and and understanding the rules for deriving the paradigms from the basic pattern will get you there more rapidly than simply memorizing paradigms.
I donāt think 3rd declension inflection changed much between Attic and koine. In any case, though I canāt claim much familiarity with the NT, mwh, who does, points out that it doesnāt reflect a single, homogeneous type of Greek. A number of different registers are represented, and each author has his own type of Greek. Some tend to be more literary than others.
ĪĪ±ĻĪµĪÆĪæĻ ĪŗĪ±į½¶ Ī Ī±ĻĻ ĻĪ¬ĻĪ¹Ī“ĪæĻ Ī³ĪÆĪ³Ī½ĪµĻĪ±Ī¹ ĻĪ±įæĻ į¼Ī½.
ĪĪ±ĻĪµĪÆĪæĻ ĪŗĪ±į½¶ Ī Ī±ĻĻ ĻĪ¬ĻĪ¹Ī“ĪæĻ Ī³ĪÆĪ³Ī½ĪæĪ½ĻĪ±Ī¹ ĻĪ±įæĪ“Īµ Ī“ĻĪæ. (dual)
ĪĪ±ĻĪµĪÆĪæĻ ĪŗĪ±į½¶ Ī Ī±ĻĻ ĻĪ¬ĻĪ¹Ī“ĪæĻ Ī³ĪÆĪ³Ī½ĪæĪ½ĻĪ±Ī¹ į¼„ĻĻĪµĻ ĻĻĪµįæĻ.
ĪĪ±ĻĪµĪÆĪæĻ ĪŗĪ±į½¶ Ī Ī±ĻĻ ĻĪ¬ĻĪ¹Ī“ĪæĻ Ī³ĪÆĪ³Ī½ĪµĻĪ±Ī¹ į¼°ĻĪøĻĻ.
(ĪŗĪ±į½¶ Ļį½° Ī»ĪæĪ¹ĻĪ¬)
For the dative:
Ī Ī±ĻĻĻĪ±ĻĪ¹Ļ Ī¼į½²Ī½ Ī“į½“ į¼” Ī¼Ī®ĻĪ·Ļ į½ĻįæĻĻĪµ Ļįæ· ĪĻĻįæ³.
Memorize the sentence, and replace Ļįæ· ĪĻĻįæ³ with other 3rd declension nouns. Ļįæ· ĻĪ±Ī¹Ī“ĪÆ, Ļįæ· Ī£ĻĪŗĻĪ¬ĻĪµĪ¹, Ļįæ· ĪøĪ·ĻĪÆ, their duals and plurals, and so on.
And so on for the other cases.
A word on whatās happening here ā highly inflected languages are possible because the human brain is very good at pattern recognition. It quickly develops a sense of what sort of things go together. There a huge carrying capacity for forms learned in this way. But nothing in a noun declension table goes together as a pattern of normal language usage! What does the dative version of a noun have to do with the accusative version? If you are trying to learn your grammar directly from tables instead of sentences, you are depriving your brain of the context that it is so good at extracting patterns from.
Short version: 1) Your brain is very good at picking sentence patterns and rhythms and Beyonce tunes. 2) Your brain is very bad at memorizing tables. There is probably at least a factor of 100 difference in how much information can be picked up in either way.
Memorize a simple sentence or phrase of real Greek.
Practice saying it until it comes out fast.
Alter it aloud, without looking at your paper. Say it until it comes out fast and natural.
Wouldnāt it be quicker to just learn the basic pattern and the rules and then the paradigms than constructing sentences (which may not be good Greek anyway, at an elementary stage) for each form of each word, and spending the time and effort memorizing the sentences?
and should I write all the subgroups declension 100 times each?
I did just that.
When(ever) a new word was introduced, I declined it 3 to 5 times, and then went straight to the exercises. In the end I think I repeated each paradigm 100 times or so.
jeidsathās advice is great. Memorizing forms out of context is silly and not how the brain processes languages (living or dead). Also, I would say always, always, always read out loud (or at least under your breath if there are others around). In fact, the ancients always read out loud. Reading a text was like pushing āplayā on a recording, the text was supposed to literally speak to you. Pick a pronunciation scheme and start to hear and feel the language. I agree with Joel that language is an aural not visual phenomenon. I think re-reading of simple texts (out loud) is an excellent way to cement the basic forms and syntax into your mind. The human brain is wired to process language aurally, and even when reading English you will notice that you can hear a voice reciting the words in your head.
Iām all for reading texts out loud, except when you want to read fast; and it is perfectly possible to register the sound internally while reading silently. Itās not true that the ancients always read out loud. Thatās a old myth thatās slow to die. And as for language being an aural not a visual phenomenon, letās remember that what we haveāand what readers in antiquity hadāis written texts, which we receive by eye, whether or not we choose then to verbalize them. The medium is a visual one. Like Textkit posts.
But yes, Iād say read aloud until you begin to find itās slowing you down. When reading itās important to effect hidden elisions and crases and especially to observe syllabic quantity. (In Ļ ĻĪ¹Ī»Īµ ĪĪµĻ , for instance, the penult is long.)
As far as the myth of reading aloud, can you point me to some material about that? I can imagine that silent reading did occur, but Iāve always been under the impression that the norm was reading aloud until the early christian monasteries promoted silent reading for practical purposes (like in modern libraries.) Basically, Iāve always thought that while some may have read silently, it was seen as weird, just as today reading aloud is seen as weird and most read silently.
Yes, the materials we have are visual, but they donāt have to stay that way with modern technology. I would encourage people to re-read a text until they can read it with a decent flow and meaning and then record themselves to listen to later. The mind learns language much more efficiently through the ear than through the eye.
As far as slowing a person down, I really canāt imagine why anyone would want to read through Ancient Greek texts any faster than one can read aloud. Skimming like that is useful for reading contemporary news articles in English where you just want to get the gist of the article, but why even learn Ancient Greek if one wants to skim the texts? Even when reading English I make sure I slow down and read aloud if itās a work that I really want to absorb and reflect on.
Pronunciation of course becomes very important when reading aloud and is always a debate, but I believe that Greek (as well as Latin) can be acquired through a number of different accents. If languages canāt function with different accents then English is in big trouble. I use Buthās pronunciation scheme since Iām most interested in Koine, but I use that pronunciation for Attic and the very limited Homeric that I read as well. It ruins poetry, unless I focus on stretching the long vowels to fit the meter, but otherwise it doesnāt present me with any problems since the ambiguities it introduces are few.
When reading itās important to effect hidden elisions and crases and especially to observe syllabic quantity.
I feel that I am only just beginning to be able to read simple prose with some approximation of naturalness. I donāt put emphasis and breaks in the correct places until I read through it a few times.
(In Ļ ĻĪ¹Ī»Īµ ĪĪµĻ , for instance, the penult is long.)
And the vowel short. Everything has to come from that double-consonant or itās wrong. I go back and forth on how abrupt I make my double-consonants.
That second piece of research while it does indeed support the need for context doesnāt seem to be good support for the specific method of learning a specific sentence with the target form.
In the study children were much better at recognizing frequently heard phrases like sit in your chair than less frequent sequences such as sit in your truck. That is to say they have trouble in generalizing from the form they have heard frequently.
This rather fits with my experience that while learning whole sentences are helpful with learning declensions that the only sure way is to read lots of stuff where the declension or to be precise sub-declension appears frequently.
There is nothing hard about 3rd declensions - what makes them hard is that there is a dearth of easy texts that learner can read in quantity in which these forms occur frequently.
Best source is probably William Johnsonās 2000 piece Towards a sociology of reading. Gives biblio and arguments and sociocultural contextualization, and has been quite influential. Available through JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1561728) if you have access to that, and probably elsewhere. Of course thereās more recent stuff too. Recognition of the unextraordinariness of silent reading among the educated goes back to a piece by Bernard Knox in the 60ās. Naturally, reading cultures throughout antiquity tended to be more oral than most are today (so I certainly wouldnāt speak of āthe myth of reading aloudā).
I would encourage people to re-read a text until they can read it with a decent flow and meaning and then record themselves to listen to later. The mind learns language much more efficiently through the ear than through the eye.
If we could listen to ancient Greeks reading, that would be great. But this way you just end up listening to yourself. Youāre not learning language, youāre selfconsciously listening to yourself selfconsciously reading a text youāve rehearsed, using your own pronunciation. And thereās nothing efficient about so time-consuming a procedure. You could spend the time reading more. Youād be reinforcing and enlarging your knowledge of the language in the process.
And when you add more people to this scenario you just multiply zero times zero and come up with another zero. I audited a course in reading NT Greek, a small group reading together, in the early 1990s. Didnāt accomplish much other than demonstrating that no two Ancient Greek students sound the same even using the same system attributed to Erasmus.
@C.S. The pronunciation scheme is far less important than the prosody. If the reader is actually communicating the text rather than reading sounds, you will benefit a great deal from it. Everyone should listen to Spiros Zodhiates read the New Testament in a Modern Greek pronunciation, for example.
@mwh I thought the same thing about the reading aloud story when I read it in W.B. Stanford. Iām glad to see that Iām not the only skeptic.
But I donāt know about the reading Ć¼ber alles advice. Iāve found lately that itās why too easy to just go through a text with 80% comprehension and not pick up much. Lately Iāve been slowing myself down, and reading the text aloud until I can read it with fluency, before going on to the next.
Compare the first attempt to the last (0:00 versus 1:10). Can anyone really doubt that I donāt pick up some real Greek in 3-4 minutes I practiced that sentence? More than just āselfconsciously listening to yourself selfconsciously reading a text youāve rehearsed, using your own pronunciationā? Iāve internalized something about the language in the above, I think.
Also, when Iām reading, I like to pick out the least familiar form in a sentence and vary the word however I can (altering number, etc. following the exercise I outlined above).
I donāt think ā at my level anyway ā that this is very inefficient. And the gains seem fairly sticky.
As no actual Ancient Greeks are ever going to hear us the fact that we donāt know how they pronounced Ancient Greek is a red herring. Of course it would be rather cool if 2500 year tape of a native speaker were to be found in a cave in Egypt but having that would have no bearing on the value or not of reading aloud.
I donāt think it is controversial that rereading text that one has already read is valuable. I personally find both listening to a text read by someone else and reading it aloud feels sufficiently different that I feel more motivated than yet another silent read. (Even saying this much I am only speaking for myself - whether this applies to anyone other than me I canāt say)
Beyond that lets admit that none of us really know. Unless there is a randomized trial we all, whichever side of the argument are putting forward plausible but untested hypothesis about how learning Ancient Greek works. I do enjoy such discussions but they can never come to a conclusion without research.
As far as I know there is no one doing research on what methods of learning Greek work best and I feel should be uncontroversial that such research would be valuable and ought to be undertaken even though we disagree on what such research would show.
Ancient Greek is at base just a language. We donāt have native speakers and we donāt know with absolute certainty how it was pronounced, but the techniques for gaining fluency in reading in modern languages will work for Greek as well. Re-reading aloud improved my reading fluency in Latin immensely, much more than trying to extensively read and continually look up words. When I come across a new word I look it up, but because I re-read the passage a number of times with the new word in context in sticks like glue. Anecdotal, yes, but Iām sold on it and there has been research done on it.
Ancient Greek was ājust a language.ā Now itās a bunch of texts. Of course we can try to recuperate it as a spoken language if we wish, but thereās a big difference between learning an ancient language and learning a language which has a community of native speakers. Thatās all too often elided on these boards. So I think you do well to confine yourself to reading fluency.
Iām all for re-reading. Comprehension of any text read for the first time will be much improved by reading it over againāas your linked āschool of the bleeding obviousā research project found.
As someone who has spent a larger fraction of Greek study time making and listening to my own recordings than almost anybody, Iād like to add my thoughts on the benefits.
Now, the fundamental passive language skill, whether reading or listening, is morpheme recognition: identifying all those prefixes, roots, suffixes and particles as you encounter them. In order to do this at the speed of ordinary speech, you need to encounter each word many times, and internalize the grammar enough to have a sense of what is possible and necessary at any point in the sentence given what has come before. If I read a difficult passage silently several times, it will likely be slower than natural speech each time, and I can puzzle out the same construction repeatedly. OTOH, if I make a recording at natural speed and then come back to it later, then I need to raise my level of mastery of the language, simply in order to understand the words in my own recording or in the printed text as Iām following along.
Also, my old recordings are a wonderful tool for bringing back my memory after I havenāt studied the language or a particular author in a while. All those sentences, and my exact pronunciations, are buried in my brain somewhere, and hearing them again brings my past work back fresh in my mind with little effort, while rereading the text would be much more like starting over again.
On the matter of selfconsciousness, I find Iām less selfconscious listening to my own recordings than I am listening to other peopleās. Almost all the words are pronounced as I think they should be pronounced, whatās there to distract me?
Also, when Iām too tired to focus on silent reading of a challenging book, I can still make recordings, especially of adapted Greek readers, and listen to them. Itās a good use of lower-quality time, and increases the time that I can spend studying Greek.
@mwh
I agree with you that Ancient Greek and Latin must be approached somewhat differently than modern languages that have native speakers, but at the same time the texts we have are still just language. They are fragments of a language, but they are nevertheless language. Iām not sure exactly what you mean by saying theyāre ātextsā. Iām assuming your point is that all we have is written language and so there is no point to develop any aural fluency in the language. I think that listening to audio of simple Greek text (readers, Thrasymachus, NT, etc.) is very helpful in mastering things like case endings, basic vocabulary, etc. By the way, Iām not an āanti-Grammar-Translationā guy even though I like many of the ācommunicativeā or ānaturalā methodologies. I say that because I get the feeling that this is where the conversation is heading.
@ariphron
Thanks for your insight about your experience with using audio. I agree with you that the best recordings are the ones you make yourself, unless of course you can find someone with a very similar Greek āaccentā.
