jeidsath and daivid, Sure, we can draw a distinction between conscious and subconscious decoding, and as we get more fluent in reading the process happens more and more at the subconscious level. I just don’t like the way “decoding” risks becoming a dirty word—and now “learning” too!
As Hylander well knows, I too have to work at understanding the texts! and not always successfully, and I too use grammars and commentaries. However can anyone expect to be able to read Greek literature otherwise?
daivid, Anyone can define two terms in such a way as to make them mutually exclusive. And ancient Greek did not come easily to me, far from it. It took a lot of hard work (and much “decoding”) to acquire what woefully little ability I have, and I know I’ll never get good at it. But I don’t believe anyone can “acquire” ancient Greek in your sense. I agree with Hylander when he says that engaging with ancient Greek texts is different from learning (or acquiring) a modern language. Resist the Sirens!
I’m curious and skeptical about the modern/ancient language distinction here, though it probably exists. After all, people sometimes learn modern languages from books, and without interaction with native speakers. Are we just talking about book-learned languages versus conversation-learned, or are there real differences between modern and ancient languages? For a language like Greek, at least, it’s not lack of texts. I don’t think that there’s any lack of intermediate material to read.
Certainly the highly declined nature of Greek and Latin makes it a challenge for English speakers. Maybe that’s a difference?
Mishima wrote that “words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too.” I sometimes wonder if modern language and modern thought is farther along in the human process of simplifying and abstracting reality.
It’s surely not a matter of ancient vs. modern as such (has anyone suggested it is?), nor of different syntactical systems (only slightly different, after all), more a matter of native speakers vs. none. So we’re in just the same position as people who learn modern languages from books alone (an extinct breed, I’d have thought), only without adequate controls. And while it’s now easy enough to learn the language of ancient Greek documentary texts at various periods, when it comes to high literature there is most certainly a lack of texts, as well as a lack of context. Why else would we slaver over a few more tatters of Sappho? But there are texts, and we can struggle to understand them.
I’m skeptical of the idea that “modern language and modern thought is farther along in the human process” of anything.
I learned Italian from books, well enough to have a conversation with cab drivers and others on a two-week visit to Rome, and well enough to read Primo Levi and Alberto Moravia. That was 18 years ago, but I’m 70 and soon I’ll be an extinct breed.
Italian also gives you access to some outstanding classical scholarship.
When I set out to learn Italian it was not only from books but also from audio tapes, and that was some fifty years ago. But it was living in Italy for a year that really taught me Italian (and much besides), and we can’t do that with ancient Greek, or have conversations with ancient Athenian or Syracusan cabdrivers. What we can do is learn to read their Moravias and Primo Levis, their Giorgio Pasqualis, their tax receipts and their Dante.
It is a pragmatic matter of what works. You make out Krashen to be some anti-intellectual who rejects learning.
According to Krashen, conscious teasing out of the meaning using solely the knowledge of the language that has been consciously learnt will not permit acquisition. He does give such knowledge value in monitoring – especially in correcting ones written work.
He basis that claim on the research. Now, it is true that I have so far been relying on his description of the research and I have not gone back to the original studies. However to dismiss him out of hand without citing any alternative research or a contrary interpretation by an alternative educationalist of the research that Krashen does cite strikes me as at least a little anti-intellectual.
I have to say I’m surprised. You have clearly a very deep understanding of Ancient Greek and for that reason I find it hard to believe that you have as much difficulty as you claim. But actually what I seem to see in what you say is that you are half using your conscious learning and half your subconscious feel for the language even for writers like Thucydides.
But if I take what you say at face value then it makes me more convinced that Krashen’s approach is necessary for the study of Ancient Greek. Up till now I have had at the back of my mind the thought that grammar-translation can’t be all bad – it produced you. But if reading Ancient Greek is really as hard for you as you imply then really grammar-translation deserves to be thrown into the dustbin of educational history.
So, if I follow you, you are saying that fluent reading of any language is impossible unless it involves conversation with native speakers. This Krashen disputes.
Half way through this video Krashen cites a study of students in Japan. The students concerned spent time in voluntary reading and their improvement was the same as is typical of students who go to America and attend English as a foreign language classes.
The study was very small, only five students, so your experience of limited success before going to Italy is on the face of it a significant counter example. But the students concerned had started on graded readers and for the study they read comics, romances and the like – that is to say, one step up to what they had been doing. Krashen rates conversation as about equivalent in difficulty to graded readers and seems to rate them as of equal value.
So whether your experience is actually a counter example depends of the type of reading you did before going to Italy.
If you had been extensively reading graded readers then your experience does suggest that graded readers do not always prove to be an adequate replacement for conversations with native speakers.
If your reading was more complex than that then your experience is in fact support for Krashen’s claim that simple comprehensible input which is set at your level is an essential stage and if you skip it you are going to struggle.
(When cab drivers in Rome talk to foreigners they will automatically produce comprehensible input suitable for whoever they are driving because that is what we all do when we realize that the person we are talking to is not a native speaker.)
I have to say I’m surprised. You have clearly a very deep understanding of Ancient Greek and for that reason I find it hard to believe that you have as much difficulty as you claim. But actually what I seem to see in what you say is that you are half using your conscious learning and half your subconscious feel for the language even for writers like Thucydides.
Try reading Thucydides or Aeschylus – try wrestling with the difficulties those texts pose – and you’ll see what mwh means. Unless and until you do this, I’m not sure you will be fully aware of the difficulties of reading ancient Greek and the need for grammar, commentaries and conscious analysis of textual meaning. And without that awareness, I’m not sure you can really address how best to gain fluency in reading ancient Greek.
As I mentioned, there are many passages in Thucydides and other ancient Greek texts (and in Latin, and, I suspect, biblical Hebrew, ancient Egyptian, etc., too) where specialists don’t agree among themselves on the correct interpretation. And as I also noted, even highly educated ancient Greeks had trouble understanding these texts. The scholia that accompany some of the mss. of the most widely read texts are evidence of this, showing that ancient readers not only needed to consciously “decode” passages in these texts but also frequently could not agree on the meaning of these passages. In fact, the Greeks invented grammar, analyzing and classifying grammatical forms, precisely because they needed grammar to understand (and often misunderstand) Homer.
One key factor that comes into play in reading ancient Greek is our unfamiliarity with context. To understand the text, we need a lot of contextual information that is not readily available to us from our every-day experience. Commentaries, which are the product of centuries and even millenia of scholarship, can supply some of this context, but there’s still much that we don’t, and probably never will, know. And it’s not as if understanding the meaning of the words can be isolated from understanding context: the two are inextricably bound together.
I’m not really intending to engage in the intricacies of this debate, but I just thought I would contribute a title I’ve recently read which some may find of interest, ‘Becoming Fluent: how cognitive science can help adults to learn a foreign language’ by Roberts and Kreuz. It’s not heavily referenced, which is frustrating, but it is very readable.
As an example of comprehensible input in the style of Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, at http://www.culturaclasica.com/lingualatina/linguagraeca.htm you’ll find ALEXANDROS. The google translation of the page renders the spanish well, but the preview can be reached from the spanish link above. The book can be found on amazon using the isbn and it’s not an unreasonable price.
Poor daivid, you’ve questioned this forum so often about methodology that when you’re right they don’t take you seriously enough. But you’re right, Krashen is right, the whole grammatical approach is wrong (as I’ve been trying to tell everybody here)
So… once again I’ll jump in on this debate risking (unintentionally) stepping on some toes or perhaps slighting some sensibilities.
First, I agree with everyone here that there’s something amiss in the whole of daivid’s learning process and I also recommend him more drilling through real Greek (maybe not now but in the near future) BUT that is all irrelevant to the present discussion.
I firmly believe that (his personal learning experience aside) daivid is totally right in several points and I stand by him.
There is definitely a gap between the very bests graded readers and real Greek, it’s a problem that should be acknowledged and solved. More comprehensible input will lead to a better and faster learning of ANY language.
The whole natural method defended by Krashen is right and the whole grammatical approach is totally wrong and should be disposed of, at least in the first years of learning a new language.
BUT
The very nature of the material left to us by Ancient Greeks and Romans (fragmentary, mostly highly complex in form and content and of exquisite literary taste and much intertextuality and background knowledge that’s partially if not completely lost to us) leaves no choice but to decode or simply guess and ponder and desperate from time to time. For this reason (and to provide the lost historical or literary context of a specific text) is what commentaries a mainly for.
My solution is to teach the language using only (or at least 90% of the time) the natural method until the student is able to fluently read and understand everything but the most complex and difficult of Greek Literature or those corrupted or fragmentary passages that leave no room but for guess and decoding. If the whole Athenaze or LLPSI experiment shows us anything it’s that’s perfectly possible to teach a language so effectively so as to allow the pupil to read actual texts with a minimum of difficulty.
Before further elaborating with examples out of my own personal experience in learning and teaching I want to make some clarifications and a couple of, let’s say, complains.
I agree with most of what Krashen say’s BUT (unless I missed something) both he and Tracy Terrell present themselves as innovators or “developers” of something called the “natural approach”. That is at least partially false. If you push me I’d say that the humanist tradition of dialogues in Greek and Latin were the great innovators of the natural method, but for the sake of the argument I’ll stick to the modern world. It was Arthur Marinus Jensen who first published in 1939 the first edition of his English by the Nature Method. He founded the Naturmetodens Sproginstitut in Copenhagen. Mr. Jensen and his institute were very active in the following decades, in 1954 appeared his Le Français par la «Méthode Nature», in 1955 a brilliant coworker of the Naturmetodens Sproginstitut named Hans Henning Ørberg published the first version of the Lingua Latina secundum naturae rationem explicata (nowadays known as the Lingua Latīna per sē illūstrāta. Pars I Familia Rōmāna). In 1962 Jensen published his L’Italiano secondo il «Metodo Natura», the following decades the Naturmetodens Sproginstitut published additional material to those methods until it suddenly and unexpectedly disappeared without a trace. Almost everything published by the Naturmetodens Sproginstitut is freely available in the Vivarium Novum webpage.
Though there are predecessors to Jensen and Ørberg, most notably W. H. D. Rouse, I believe that the real innovator here is Jensen. Thus I think that Prof. Terrell and Krashen are either completely unaware of those great predecessors or incurring in a very serious act of omission if not academic dishonesty.
Now to my complains.
Two times in January (here and here) I mentioned both Mr. Jensen and Ørberg’s Familia Rōmāna, on both occasions I provided several links to the Vivarium Novum Academy in Rome (the single most successful project of implementation of the nature method). And yet it was only in May that (in this case) daivid took notice of something that I had mentioned MONTHS before.
Yes, some attempts have been made, the Italian edition of Athenaze is until now the best result. Am I writing to a wall here? Or am I not taken seriously? If I’m wasting my (and everybody’s) time please tell me and I’ll go bother someone else.
So, I have to ask. daivid have you read the ITALIAN version of Athenaze or the supplementary material that’s been available for years in the Vivarium Novum webpage?
My second complain is somehow related to the first one, not only here, but practically everywhere in the world I’ve encountered this subtle (and I believe honestly unconscious) bias from native English speakers, they systematically ignore or forget everything that’s not written in English. We are dealing with a lack of teaching and learning material in our beloved Classics and in the Humanities in general and the last thing we need is this nitpicking. We have too little material at our disposal to allow ourselves the luxury of ignoring other valuable contributions from our non-English speaking colleagues.
Back to business:
I partially disagree with Krashen’s dismissal of writing and speaking (especially in the case of dead languages), though I do agree that one does really learn more by just hearing and reading. For example I learned English by playing two video games:
The videogame is basically 80% dialogue in which one has to choose what one wants to say out of a relatively limited set of options, depending on what you say (aka what you decide) you form your character’s personality, influence your companions and ultimately shape the whole story of the videogame. The story and side stories are very interesting and the whole game is super entertaining. In less than six months I went form being only able to say “hello, goodbye” and basic questions to being able to read entire books, newspapers, writing essays and even speaking with relative fluency (But in all honesty I have to admit that I dedicated an excessive amount of time to the game, at least 8 hours a day all week long). I perfectioned my English with more extensive reading of Star Wars fanfictions and books and eventually the continuous reading of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, eventually they took me to Hemingway and such until I reached Byron and Shakespeare in about a year and a half.
In 2011 I passed the CAE with an almost perfect score, my punctuation was so high that I was awarded a C2 in all tested areas: speaking, writing, reading and listening instead of the normal C1 that’s awarded for the CAE.
But here’s the thing, not only did I took no preparatory course for the test, I didn’t even study for it. Yet I always struggled and still struggle with grammar and syntax questions. Even now if you ask me anything grammar related I’m simply blank, I honestly do not know. I do not know what the Future Perfect Progressive is or how it differentiates from the Future Perfect Simple or the Future Progressive. And don’t get me started on Word order and Syntax (I actually failed a University test about it some months ago because it focused only on grammatical analysis). And yet I can still perfectly understand and write and speak English using all of those grammatical contraptions without a single mistake because I acquired them unconsciously through contact and repetition.
On a more recent example, I was reading with a German friend (who studies to become an English teacher) some translations of the Bible, specifically the King James, I was not consciously aware at all that in Modern English only the 3rd Person Inflection remains “he/she bears”. Yet I understood perfectly when I read the Bible “Thou bearest record of thyself” (The 2nd person inflection). My friend was astounded, he asked me how I knew that, he had to look into a Grammar of Early Modern English because he had not seen that inflection form in his life, only what was in his Modern English Grammar. He asked me if I did not mix up the verb forms when speaking, which of course I don’t, but I can imitate to some degree all of the Early and even Archaic English that I have read even if I ignore the rules behind it.
On the same note. I never had a good Spanish teacher until High School, so I spent the first 15 to 16 years of my life not knowing what a verb was, I couldn’t for the life of me identify an article or and adverb, much less tell you what the hell that was or how it worked. Yet because of my continuous reading I could imitate the best of Cervantes’ Spanish and even write sonnets and other forms of poetry based on just sound and imitation alone. But even to this day when my foreign friends ask me about Spanish grammar I sometimes have to confess that I have no idea what they’re talking about.
In summary Krashen is not entirely wrong in his emphasis of reading and listening but I’m very convinced that the active (or productive) aspect is equally important. I’m convinced that this methodology only worked for me because I was still taking an active role in the communication of the videogame. I was the one who chose the answers. My experience as a classics student and teacher has convinced me that an active (or productive) role is necessary for the total attainment of a language.
With Greek and Latin, speaking and writing (composition) become all the more important because that’s where you are confronted to the real cultural clash. How do I express something that perhaps had no value for the Greeks or Romans? A friend once composed a couple of hexameters about giving his heart to a girl, and it immediately struck me that no Roman would have expressed such sentiment the way my friend said it. My friend was writing for a modern girl with modern sensibilities that have been shaped by the idea of love that originates in the middle Ages and the Romantic period, the whole production (speaking and writing) is basic in familiarizing yourself with the real usage of the language.
Now I also have some doubts about the way Krashen explains why this nature method works the way it works, though I have not bothered to read ALL of Krashen’s publications so I maybe misinterpreting him. Whatever the case I must agree with his critics that this “nature” approach can be very subjective, its effectiveness can vary form person to person and it’s hard to measure (I also believe that the most staunch critics of this approach do so because of the lack of a “precise” way of measurement).
I entirely disagree with the underlined statements of Dante and mwh. I honestly believe that this grammar-translation approach is the reason that Classics as a subject is dying, nobody learns Greek and Latin anymore because it’s presented is such a way as to make it a torture to learn.
This distinction is real, if my living experience is not proof enough, how can you explain that a child learns his mother tongue without ever (consciously) learning any grammar or syntax at all?
Now for some suggestions. Instead of torturing the poor daivid with this translation nonsense. Why don’t we paraphrase into more simple Attic the parts that he doesn’t understand of a given text? Out of that paraphrase we could work out some small dialogues with the vocabulary and mix it with the original. Ideally someone could draw pictures of the realia. (On that point one of the greatest desiderata of Greek scholarship is the equivalent to the In usum delphini series for Latin authors).
And for the sceptics, why don’t you pick any of Jensen’s methods for a modern language and give it a try? I’m sure that with just a couple of hours a day you can become fluent in six to twelve months (even less if you combine it with intensive reading and a lot of contact with the language via radio, youtube, movies, etc.)
There are simple and scarcely contested reasons (mainly to do with the growth of other areas of the curriculum) why Classics (by which I mean Latin and Greek) is less widely studied than it used to be. The reason you give has very little to recommend it, largely because it’s proposing an alternative explanation for a decline that has already been very plausibly explained.
Up to when I discovered Krashen, I was very conscious that I didn’t have much to back up what I was saying apart from my personal experience of how reading simple texts (children’s books) in Serbo Croat was key to learning that language while the lack of that option seemed to me to be the key barrier to learning Ancient Greek. But as there were very significant other differences it is hard to be sure that my perception that it was the reading of simple texts that was key is correct.
Krashen on other hand has academic standing both in linguistics and education so he ought to be take seriously even though there are other academics who disagree. ( And doesn’t seem to me that many of the critics of Krashen are advocates of grammar translation)
That’s perhaps a bit unfair. Krashen does at times mention other writers who preceded him in saying the same thing. He certainly could do that more often but if he did it is possible that it would mostly just make his talks less focused.
I still keep discovering resources that I ought to have known about but in this case it was because I don’t intend to study Latin,
I owe to Athenaze a great deal of the the Ancient Greek that I have acquired -there is just not enough of it.
I have not obtained the Italian edition but I have read the readings in the workbook. I have been given the impression that most of the extra stuff in the Italian edition found its way into the workbook.
I don’t think it’s bias. Or to be precise the bias is in what booksellers choose to make available to us. Several Astrix books for example have been translated into Ancient Greek but it is very hard to obtain them in Britain.
The sample of Asterix I have seen suggest that the Greek is quite hard but I would have given it a go if I had had the chance.
He does have good arguments on his side on his claim that acquisition comes from input only but I myself am yet to be fully convinced. But even if true, writing is essential for Ancient Greek as a way of helping others in providing comprehensible input (even if it doesn’t help the writer).
That really does sound like an excellent learning resource but arguably if you were choosing the commands from options you getting comprehensible input rather than producing output.
The key aspect of the video game was it was engaging. Games do allow you to expose yourself to the same grammatical structures and vocabulary over and over but as they are part of a game you don’t experience it as repetitive.
Menander and Chariton do portray their women as breathtakingly passive but I don’t feel that the problem is one of the language itself. Chaereas is shokingly indiferant to what Callirhoe wants and yet it is clear that it is crucial for Chariton that Callirhoe loves Chaereas. There feelings are still recognizably human and I see no reason one could not use Ancient Greek to write a romance in which the woman is portrayed as having as equal power to act for herself as the guy.
I have read some research in which an input method didn’t do to well compared with grammar instruction. It was obvious to me that the experiment wasn’t really applying Krashen’s recommendations but it was also clear that to do so would make the experiment much harder to run.
When I am reading the difference between comprehensible input and what is not is sharp and clear. It is also for a very clear cut divide between using my acquired feel for the language and my conscious learnt knowledge. There is a book that I’m reading in Serbo-Croat for me to read using my acquired feel alone but its not some mixture of the two methods. The acquired feel takes me so far and then I have to switch.
For a learner it is very easy do know when they are reading comprehensible input and provided there is enough graded material available it is easy to switch to stuff that is the right level for themselves.
For an experimenter, the fact that comprehensible input is so dependent on the level of each individual makes experiments hard to devise. Hard but by no means impossible.
To fair, mwh, usually takes a lot of time to correct the stories that I have posted. Indeed having re-read the ones he ignored I would say that he always corrects the ones that are worth correcting. If he never writes a easy-Greek story himself but knocks into shape theeasy-Greek stories written by others that lack his ability he will of done a great service for learners simply doing that.
I think it was Hillel who said, in a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.
Though not designed exactly for the same purpose, we do have Doukas’ Ajax. That, combined with some good editions of the Scholia and Chad’s monolingual notes, provide the building blocks. But I forget who said, if you build it, they will come.
Here I must say that your impression is not very accurate, the first volume of the English version has 386 pages out of which only 281 have actual Greek (and with a lot of English vocabulary, big pictures, grammar explanations and exercises in between). The Italian edition has 529 pages out for which 423 are pure Greek with small illustrations, synonyms and almost no Italian around except for the grammar explanations at the end of each chapter and some notes. That difference is considerably bigger in the second volume (the second English volume has 398 pages, the Italian 610). Take a look yourself there’s a free preview available here and here.
If you have any good impression of the English version I strongly urge you to immediately acquire the Italian one, were talking about at least 142 extra pages of pure comprehensible input just in the first volume and some 200 on the second.
I see, it struck me as a surprise because on both occasions (here and here) I was addressing specifically you and the subject was language acquisition theories and I made very clear references (as in, saying the names) to an “active method”, “nature method” or “inductive method”. Anyway I hope I was any help at all.
Actually Doukas made editions of almost all the great Tragedies, Homer, Pindar, Theocritus and some historians and orators (sadly my beloved Thucydides got a Katharevousa paraphrase instead of an attic one) they can be found here.
Other than more comprehensible input I’d say that making new paraphrases with attic explanations, synonyms and images of the basic authors should be the next priority for teachers.
I completely agree but I believe translation is far worse a treason (Traduttore, traditore!). At any rate paraphrasing at least offers the benefit of forcing you to remain in the target language and exposes you to lexical and syntactical variety i.e. you see the enormous difference between prosaic style and poetic style, the difference between a very complex and ornate prose style and the simplicity of a subject-verb-object-complements style. Thus it helps to better appreciate the beauty of the original and it allows you to understand the basic sense of what the text says within the realm of the target language and without having to consciously do some tedious grammatical analysis.
Of course if something requires a more detailed explanation that’s what commentaries are for (and in an ideal world those commentaries would also be in the original, like in the In usum Delphini series).
Reading translations instead of the original is of course not recommended if you’re trying to learn Greek, but using good translations of difficult passages in your own language to pinpoint the meaning of the original is much more effective than using dumbed down paraphrases in a language you don’t know as well.
Paraphrases can give you at most a general sense of the meaning of the original. Why bother? Why not just make the effort to understand the original on its own terms?
Making your own translation into your own language --trying to capture the meaning of the Greek with as much precision as you can muster – is a good way to sharpen your understanding of the Greek.
Having read a lot of back and forth on this issue, it seems like the people advocating the Grammar Method and the people advocating the Comprehensible Input Method are simply interested in different goals and thus are speaking past each other.
The Grammar Method People don’t seem to be very interested in using the Ancient Greek language to communicate in, like some people do in Latin or Sanskrit.
The Comprehensible Input People seem to want to partially revive a dead language, to the extent possible. Perhaps modeled on the way Latin is used (Even Rosetta Stone has a learning package). I sympathize with the Comprehensible input people. They seem to just want an equality in the two classical languages. Why should Latin be allowed to have all these wonderful teaching methods and the Greek language should go impoverished.
Therefore, to be fair, I don’t think that the comprehensible input people want to paraphrase original Ancient Greek to actually “understand” the texts better, they just want something to read without having to turn the text into a brain teaser. So instead of coming up with something new, they just want to remove a few things…rearrange some stuff and get an easily readable text.
That said I think that the people struggling are gonna have to produce the paraphrases and quaint forms of comprehensible input for themselves…I don’t think you’re gonna be able to convince some “fluent” Ancient Greek reader to do this (if they really even exist).
Mainly because they don’t have any interest in reviving the language. Re-reading a text that has embellished phrases and obscure words is enough for them because each reading reveals a different nuance and shade of meaning. And to be honest as I am slowly filling in the gaps in my knowledge and continue to learn the various idioms, I can see why the grammar people are so fond of leaving Ancient Greek in the grave…Although I do enjoy me some easy Greek… umm mmmm…its so much more relaxing.
Okay… 1) I have nothing against occasionally consulting a translation when you’re in doubt (I do so myself). 2) Paraphrases, like any other teaching device should be used with prudence and timing, only when the pupil is capable of understanding the paraphrase does it make any sense to use one in order to clarify a much difficult text.
3)… I believe the term “dumbed down” is unjustified. First because we have a lot of very, very complex authors who purposefully tried to become as intricate and dark as possible so as to show off their skill and vast knowledge. In the case of say, Pindar, Lycophron (hell I’d say any Hellenistic Poet) or even Thucydides I’d say a paraphrase is more of a “normalisation” than a “dumbing”. Second because there a many types of paraphrases whose complexity varies depending on the intention they were written for.
For example we have the Ørberg style paraphrases like this one of the Aeneid which are so meticulously done within the greater plan of a general method that the author knows in advance what words are new to the student, what words are used in a different sense or with an unusual syntactic structure, he knows that because the student has seen those words countless of times in his course and even in the event that he forgot, the student can easily go the index of his Familia Rōmāna and in seconds find the word in the context in which he learned it. The new words or structures are explained in Latin at the margin with synonyms or with pictures.
Then we have those like that of Sisto Colombo that only offer a paraphrase of those particular passages or constructions that are too difficult to get at first sight even for an advanced student and the paraphrase is by no means “dumb”. This type of paraphrase is done for experienced readers who only require one or two clarifications in the whole text.
Then there is the In usum Delphini type like this one which is for for students that are probably reading the author for the first time and/or have only read their Caesar, Cicero and maybe bit of Catullus, they need a lot of help and relatively easy explanations.
And then you have the monsters like de la Cerda that have not only a very elegant paraphrase but a very detailed commentary. This guy is still a reference for all serious commentators of Virgil, they just keep quoting him because he was that good.
None of these paraphrases I would call “dumb”, in fact I’m more than ready to believe some knows a language the moment he can spontaneously paraphrase something he read and explain it with easier words (or even better if he can do so elegantly like de la Cerda) than to believe in a translation no matter how good it may be.
I don’t agree entirely but I can say the very same thing about translations, no matter how good they are they can give at most a general sense of the meaning of the original and they carry the problem of the semantic load that the target language has but the Greek lacks (or vice versa). And like I said the benefits of making your own paraphrase no matter how simple trump the translation because they force you think in the target language instead of your native tongue, with the translation at the very best you’d be demonstrating that you dominate your mother tongue but not necessarily the original language (Unless you make a word for word “translation” which proves even less). Take Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar or Alfonso Reyes’ Iliad, heck even Pope’s Iliad for example, any classicist worth his salt will immediately spot all the imprecisions not to say misunderstandings or even falsehoods in their translations but they’re still the greatest monuments of literary and aesthetic skill and mastery in their respective tongues and cultures.
Have you ever been among foreigners whose language you’re trying to learn? Do they not occasionally have to “dumb down” what they’re saying in order to teach you the “smart” way to say it? It’s called learning for a reason and I don’t see the crime in helping others understand step by step.
I disagree entirely. Translation is the very last step in the chain of learning (not only another language) but your own, it presupposes (if done seriously and professionally) a command of both original and target language, it can be good exercise for intermediate or advanced students but I’d never use it on beginners.
Just to clarify I have nothing against the translation per se, I believe translations are an indispensable tool in spreading and perpetuating knowledge as much in “appropriating” (I believe that’s the word used among young people in college these days) the past that each generation must have. I just don’t think that as a pedagogical tool it serves any purpose that cannot be easily replaceable by better methods.
I’d love to discuss this with examples of Greek paraphrases but like I said we have such a lack of them that finding even a decent one would be difficult, most of them are like the Doukas’ one, made for a native speaker of the language that has trouble understanding the “archaic” words, not for some one who is trying to learn the language from zero.
I’m sorry if I gave you that impression, but at least I believe that paraphrases (those done by others as well as those done by one self) are a good and effective instrument to actually understand the text. Just like composition if done properly and combined with intensive reading it leads to a mastery of the language better than any translation exercise (except perhaps inverse translation).
At least my intentions are purely didactic. My main interest is in finding an effective, reliable and not too tedious way to teach (and learn) new languages, with the final objective being always the reading and understanding of the ancient authors, I have no interest in reviving any language just for its own sake.
If anything I’d simply argue that we should not treat Latin or Greek as if they were math, but treat them like any other language because that’s what they are.
Actually, the effort is already starting, there’s JACT’s Reading Greek, the mentioned Athenze, the Cultura Clásica material, it’s just the academic prejudice that we need to overcome.
Anyway I believe this discussion is fruitful, important and worth having. I’d love to discuss particular examples and if I had the time and resources I’d actually make the experiment of separating groups of learners and teaching them with different methods and comparing results.