I just hope you spend plenty of time on the things that will actually count towards helping speak Attic Greek. It sounds like you have a pretty good mind-set so I won’t press this any further. I was concerned earlier because I frequently see people pay a lot of attention to niceties/small talk, which do nothing for them but propagate a (vaguely insulting) veneer of speaking the language (actually a difficult thing to do properly), while neglecting the hard-core learning that would be necessary for the main body of their communication to be in good Greek.
Let me add an educated guess about the learning path that adult students using the method you have described might follow. For a few years, I was teaching adult ab initio English beginners - some of China’s middle-aged millionaires that you’ve probably seen reports about. Introducing L2 (ie English) phrases, without L1 (in their case Chinese) equivalents invariably lead to initial confusion. Drawing pictures, miming, role-playing, using realia, whatever always lead to multiple interpretations of what the phrase meant. Even those who could correctly produce the phrase (parrot fashion) had varying degrees of understanding. Eavesdropping on their conversations in Chinese it was remarkable how diverse their understandings were. For example, holding up a piece of paper and saying, “This is paper.” got understandings like “He says it is white”, “we should write our names”, “did you bring paper? I didn’t (followed by pages being hastily ripped from somebody’s notebook)”, etc. The basic assumption was that there was meaning, but quite what that meaning was was open to a range of guesses. If somebody saw you using the phrases in daily life as you are suggesting, that is what it might be like.
Again for ab initio classes, but in this case classes when I explain the meaning of a phrase in Chinese, the learners invariably guessed wrongly about which part of the English carried which part of the meaning that they could get from the Chinese. Surprisingly, it was not always based on the word order: there was no such assumption of structure or logical arrangement.
After a few weeks of the parallel grammar lessons, those initial seemingly random understandings give way to what we could call comprehension of the language per se. At that point, another interesting thing happens. The memorised phrases are “corrected” to conform to the learnt grammar. What was memorised as, “She gets home at 6pm.” might be produced as, “She get to home on 6pm”. It is then a comparatively long time before the spoken and written grammar returns to the standard of the initially memorized phrases.
Do I think there is value in memorising phrases? Yes. They engender confidence and communicative competencies beyond the level expected of a beginner, and they provide standardised language samples that later attempts at grammar can be compared with. Do I think learning phrases is a substitute for learning grammar? No. They are different types of learning. Reciting phrases is not the productive use of language. Is there initial benefit from memorising phrases? Yes. Long-term? Perhaps not.
If the book were “animated”, then that might be a different matter.
D’s book is a sociolinguistic study, not a guidebook for usage. Studying something is always much safer than doing it. Trying to produce a language is an inherently high-risk venture. Simply studying it doesn’t leave one open to the same sort of criticism.
I’m not sure that giving absolute beginners a robust piece of scholarship is necessarily a good idea. Within the learning sequence that you are advocating, somebody using the phrase book already has a good grasp of the language, and might want to understand nuanced idioms correctly. The OP has in mind a different path to perfection, with a beginner starting with phrases. Giving a robust piece of scholarship to complement the phrases in the memorise list may be more than a little overwhelming.
Imagine that in modern terms:
Concierge: Good morning sir. Welcome to our hotel. Is it your first time in our country.
Guest: Well, good morning to you. Yes. It is.
Concierge: On behalf of the National Tourism Commission, I’d like to offer you a complementary 30 page phrase book and an academically sound 300 page sociolinguistic study of the forms of address used in our country.
Guest: Thank you very much.
Concierge: Enjoy your stay.
Guest: Thank you. I feel closer to the language already.
I assume you are using “you” here in reference to people in general. I personally am not dismissing Seneca’s suggestion or ranking it as above the method suggested by the OP. I pointing out that there us a different type of learning involved in the two approaches, I am also half implying that it is beyond (outside the scope of and of equal value to) the approach suggested. The simplified formal address given to Herr Schulz doesn’t adequately cover the Greek idiom, so it is inadequate, but nobody expects a work for beginners to be exhaustive.
Most people expect that beginners material should not teach incorrect language, but that it at least teaches a subset of the correct language that can be supplemented later.
Its not very satisfactory that this thread has descended into what seems like irrelevant nit-picking or simply restating what has already been said. But perhaps that’s inevitable and I should by now be used to it.
Its perfectly ridiculous to think I intended the OP to read Dickey. I thought others might be interested.
The arguments for and against oral methods and resources like " Sprechen sie Attisch" have been endlessly and tediously rehearsed. I have no interest in reheating them.
Not one thing I wrote was intended for anyone’s benefit except the OP’s nor could anyone who made the slightest effort to comprehend it consider it ‘nit-picking.’ (Or irrelevant.) Moreover it has nothing to do whatsoever with “the arguments for and against oral methods” and everything to do with this particular book.
Nevertheless as a large body of text has now been placed above which is indeed overly digressive or of scant relevance to the OP I would like to summarize my outlook for his/her sake:
The translations are terrible - you, OP, are aware of that - but realize that correct understanding of the phrases in question requires, as with all your study of Greek vocabulary, an inspection of usage in Attic. Someone speaking native English will not give you what you really need, simply by cleaning up the English idiom.
The book’s Greek is hardly Attic, as I demonstrated. I assume that your goal is to speak Attic primarily so you can better read/understand Attic. This again you could fix with an inspection of usage in Attic. Everyone wants short-cuts and quite rightly: but material of less-than-academic rigour must then be avoided.
Phrases for everyday conversation should be regarded as a triviality and while fine for fun (if you like), I just hope you are also doing the main work of learning Attic (by the oral or any other method), and do not believe the practice of such phrases will itself lead to ‘fluency,’ as many do, following the practice of modern-language teaching. The reason I wished to subjoin this remark is explained in my penultimate post above.
@ ἑκηβόλος: I am sure the OP appreciated the work you were doing on his list before my initial comment. I’m sure he’d be grateful if you decide to continue it. If you wish to generate an extended discussion of anything I have brought up, it would be better to open a separate thread or (if you see me as main correspondent) to PM me.
@Callisper
The extended replies to various points was not intended as a philibuster move to bury the points you made. Getting them out of the way (into another thread) to not distract attention from what you are saying seems a bit extreme. This is not a wiki (a virtual palimpset) where others can edit what you have written. This is a forum (a multiway conversation) where only the poster has ownership and the right to change what they have written. What each person says has their screen name with it. People reading a thread know what opinions are yours. Having a range of opinions in the same thread will allow yours to be considered alongside whatever other opinions are posted.
Since it is central to this discussion, the unspoken assumptions about “Attic” could be explicated.
Presumably, the compiler of the phrase book believed he was writing an Attic phrase book. He may have believed that the (Attic) Koine was a form of Attic. Lucian, despite his vocabulary, presumably also believed he was writing Attic when he was trying to write Attic, and his readers would probably have accepted it as such. Writers during the Byzantine millennium also believed they were writing in Attic (among other styles). That suggests that there are numerous broader definitions of what consitutes Attic. The narrow way defining Attic is to say that it is limited to the way that Greek was spoken and written in Attica during a small window of time and limited to only certain styles or authours.
Modern conversational approaches to teaching and learning that produce “Attic” in conversation necessarily follow one of the broader definitions of Attic - because speakers are not limited in time and space to the original time and place where Attic was born.
If the compiler of the phrase book had held a narrow definition of what constitutes Attic, he may have produced something that conformed more closely to that definition. However, he seems to have held one or other of the broader views.
I have finished the first chapter of your course and would gladly help with the editing in line with your two objectives.
Rather than read through the entire course in one slog I would prefer to work through it at a learning pace with a correct-as-you-go approach. I have found this has worked best when editing my own courses: I find it more thorough and time efficient.
In light of the contributions from others in the discussion above, we would need to collaborate on what exactly would be edited and how closely you wanted to stick to the Sprechen Sie Attisch Greek entries and their English translations.