I don’t think I’m supposed to post links yet, but I wonder if the tide may not be turning regarding pronunciation. In addition to Chrys Caragounis’ well done (I thought) book a few years back, there’s a fellow named Randall Buth who produces Greek learning materials with a reconstructed Koine pronunciation scheme that is very similar to Modern Greek. It will be interesting to see how students in the West are pronouncing Greek in 20 years…
I wonder if the tide may not be turning regarding pronunciation.
My sense is that you may be correct. I am an Erasmian, but there is a real on-line presence of those who do NT Greek with a Modern Accent. Where we will be in 20 years is harder to say. Anyone who is serious about Greek must learn to use several different accents, in order to take advantage of all the resources available.
ερρωσο.
I used Mounce’s BBG for self-study and found his method of teaching to be very easy to follow and it got me reading and translating at a decent level of proficiency by the time I was done with the text and the workbooks.
Now, however, I am trying to go deeper into Greek and really understand it. I have found that Mounce has sacrificed some important information for the sake of easy learning. For example, I have realized that I can hardly form a sentence in Greek on my own! (We’ve been having a discussion about this over on B-Greek as well, so sorry about the redundant comments!) I have been going through the First Greek Writer in the Textkit library, and I am having to cover a lot of ground that I feel I should have learned right off the bat in introductory grammar.
So, Mounce is a bit of a trade off. You gain early reading comprehension but perhaps sacrifice a true understanding of how the language works. Mounce is very upfront about this in the Rationale section of his introduction to the textbook. I am beginning to think I may have to go back and work through an older (or at least different) grammar to fill in the gaps. Maybe Croy as was suggested over on B-Greek.
Anyway, just my two cents!
Refe
I second this! We used Mounce in bible college for our first year, and second year we started text translation and used Metzger’s vocabulary aids. All of our work in three years of Koine study was Greek to English. It was only last year (nearly ten years after my last college-level Greek course) that I started working with a group on Athenaze, which has English to Greek translations. I was completely unprepared!
I still feel like a toddler when writing in Greek, but it’s getting easier. I mean, the writing is getting easier, but the level of grammar is getting more difficult. We’re in chapter 15 of Athenaze level one (there are 16 total chapters in that level). When we finish, we’ll be moving on to level two. It’s been a blast working on Attic. I just hope that I get to a decent level of proficiency.
I just started reading/translating the Apology. My scheme is to:
(1) Sit and invest time in translating a section, marking unfamiliar vocab and unknown forms, looking them up in Diogenes, making notes about them and understanding them, translating it all into English;
(2) Rereading the sections up to that point throughout the week, practicing reading and comprehension without the English translation, becoming comfortable with the text as it is;
(3) Moving on to the next section and reading all of the previous sections again before breaking it down.
I want to read through the Apology so many times in the process of this work that at the end I’ll be comfortable with it and have no problem at all with the Greek.
I know that the Apology is supposed to be easy (though, I don’t feel that at all), but I think this type of work will pay off greatly. I want to be able to pull vocab from that text and use it in my own compositions. Eventually I’ll be a good Greek student, despite the weaknesses that Mounce gave me (as well as the teacher who led our studies in Bible college - who I thought was amazing at the time, but with whom I’m now seriously disappointed).