It was getting to me but I do realize that you did not intend that. So I too am sorry that I let it get to me.
Krashen merely says works and what does not work. In some ways it is a bit depressing. He is saying that if you have no comprehensible input you are screwed. He says several times something like “I have done the easy part. I have shown that what is needed is comprehensible input that is engaging. The harder bit, the job of educators is to produce that engaging comprehensible input”.
But he also says that you only acquire what you are ready to acquire and that is done in a natural order. Hence if the input has advanced features it will simply go over your head until you are ready to absorb it.
There is an implication to that which he doesn’t say. That is, just as the advanced aspects of the input don’t help, if the input has mistakes but those mistakes relate to aspects of the language that are advance for you they won’t do any harm. They will just go over your head.
Hence it is not essential that only people with perfect command of Ancient Greek write comprehensible input. All you need to do is read input from someone who is better than yourself.
Hence there is no need to be too fussy about the input you get so long as it is both comprehensible and engaging to you.
I really like that quote. Thank you. But don’t you see why I was bound to love it. If even a professor sees Greek as absurdly difficult there was be a serious problem as to how Ancient Greek is taught.
daivid, I think you underestimate Textkit members’ willingness to help you.
What I think would be a good idea would be for us to agree on a fairly straightforward passage of Greek, and get you not simply to attempt a translation of it, which you can post on here, but to specify exactly which vocabulary items, word endings or constructions are preventing you from accurately grasping what is being said. You can consult a lexicon and grammar, of course, as we all do from time to time, though doing so may still not help you unravel all the meaning of the passage. I for one would be willing to walk you through some Greek in this way if you are willing to make your own attempt first.
How about doing the passage below from Xenophon? You can put it in a separate thread if you prefer.
When I first saw this I did at once see it was from Anabasis book 1 but I was also a little depressed because I thought I would not understand it even though I know I have read it. Then I saw ἐξελαύνει. Bliss. I love the ἐξελαύνει bits with the predictable days journey and the number of parasangs. Without looking up a single word I was able to get the gist of it. True, I remembered the bit about Kuros training his troops in hunting so I’m not sure to what extent I was reading and to what extent I was being reminded. I had, however, forgotten the bridge and indeed that γέφυρα means bridge but the context brought it back. Without checking the words I could not now give you a proper translation but that bit does just about count as comprehensible input for me.
It is however an especially easy bit of the Anabasis -indeed did you not select it for that reason?
However, you misunderstand my problem. Even with the very difficult bits I am usually able to eventually decode Xenophon fully. And now that I have Claxton’s book I have a guide that will help me through even the hardest bits. Claxton really goes out of her way to give help for every possible pitfall for people like me. This does mean that her explanations are always at least five times as long as the text she is explaining but for that she has my full thanks.
(I have only on a single occasion found that Claxon’s explanations did not completely resolve all difficulties and I might pose a question on that soon but it is not impossible I will eventually work it out on my own.)
The problem is that I know that when I return at a later stage to read the difficult bits of Xenophon I am back to square one. I am usually able to succeed in decoding (with the help of commentaries and Perseus of course) in the end. However, what I have to decode I end up forgetting.
Were you to ask what help I think I need it would be for you to write something in very simple Greek with plenty of repetition and avoids too many rare words about something that is for you engaging.
In short, Krashen style comprehensible input.
But leaving that aside, your selection did give my self-confidence a little boost as you did manage to select one of the bits that I do not find overwhelming. Thank you.
that in the case of some passages you’re far from being “back to square one” when you encounter them again. Of course harder passages will be harder to recover the meaning of than easy passages on a second encounter, but in the case of even the hardest passages you will never be truly back to square one, however pessimistic your own assessment of your powers of recollection is.
This is emphatically not the solution to your problem. You need to encounter more real Greek, not more phoney Greek, if real Greek is ultimately what you want to be able to read. Just as you can’t expect to be able to ride a bicycle without stabilizers unless at some point you take the stabilizers off, you can’t expect to be able to read the Iliad, say, unless you start reading the sort of Greek the Iliad is written in.
The most straightforward way of doing that of course is just to read the Iliad itself. What does it matter if at first your progress is painfully slow, if you take an hour reading five lines, and if a month later you have forgotten most of what you took such pains to understand? Whose reproach, apart from your own, are you afraid of? At least you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you are engaged in the serious business of reading real unadulterated Greek, and that you are getting through it, albeit with Herculean efforts.
The idea that in spite of regularly and attentively reading real Greek you will never get any better at doing so is just fanciful. Analyse the curriculum followed by any member of this forum whose Greek is significantly better than yours and you will find that they have read significantly more real Greek than you have.
Get as much real Greek under your belt as you can. Do everything you can to understand what the Greek is saying; don’t just skim over things that you could understand better by looking more things up. When you can’t get the Greek to make sense, refer to a translation to help you understand why the Greek says what the translation says it says.
And give up your study of language acquisition theories for a while. It’s clearly not helping you learn Greek.
I look forward to seeing your first attempt at wringing meaning from a passage of real Greek and your detailed explanation of the things in it that still puzzle you and why.
I think Krashen’s advice is mostly good, though there are parts that I have become very skeptical about over the years. One example of the very good is at 25 minutes in, when he lists three things, and says that 1 & 2 are absolutely essential, while 3 is a curse:
Motivation
Self-esteem
Anxiety
When considering how to deal with 2 & 3, it’s good to remember that “false plateau” is very a real thing in language learning. Language learners are not good judges of their own progress. Sometimes learners think they know more than they do, but more frequently, they don’t realize that they have been making major unconscious progress.
Daivid, or others, if you think you aren’t making progress, consider coming up with metrics that will allow you to compare your current self to yourself 3 or 6 months from now.
Victor’s advice and Timothée’s parallel Krashen’s in some major ways. Krashen says to do “the opposite of this focus on form stuff, focus on the message.” Everything in this thread is some version of that, I think.
Personally, I found that my progress really skyrocketed at two points in the last year:
Reading Plato’s Apology with a group of traditional learners. I found that I had some major advantages, but that there was a lot to learn from their devotion to form and accuracy. After a few months, I had made major progress.
(Aside: One thing that I think that held my fellows back was sentence analysis. They look for the verb before reading the sentence, etc. Myself, I never mark up texts, and I think that’s a short-term handicap, but a long-term advantage. Also they were always looking for perfect translations, rather than being satisfied with the 50%, 70% or 90% that they could understand at their current level.)
Reading through all of the Lucian intermediate readers that I could get my hands on. Very comprehensible input. I think that the intermediate same page readers are really great for taking the mechanical work out reading.
A number of times before this last year, I have stared at a block of Perseus text thinking “this makes no sense to me. Is learning Greek really possible?” I don’t recall having that thought in recent months. A lot of Greek is “easy” to me now, and I need nothing but the text to understand it, for other Greek I need a dictionary, and for a lot of Greek I need a commentary and dictionary. I hope that my “easy” Greek circle continues to expand over the coming year.
I do think very much about learning efficiency and where I can do better. Right now I’m working on some software that’s a bit of a Mad Libs/Machine-learning enabled Anki/Auto-translate tool. I hope to use it to increase my Greek composition skills.
What all three of you have done is tell me that that what I say is happening in my study of Greek is wrong and that something quite different is happening. It is true that ones own perception is not always accurate. However, none of you are with me during the day so why should I believe your assumptions about my language study are more accurate than my direct experience?
Language plateau? The first year of my study I made rapid progress. After the first year of apparent no progress I said to myself “it’s a plateau”. After 2 years still plateau but after four years? Joel, my plateau has lasted longer that your entire study.
And the evidence that I am making not progress is here: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/what-i-did-studying-greek-today-in-greek/14099/1 Despite great, not to say heroic, efforts on the part of mwh to correct me I continued to make the same mistakes and even those mistakes he did succeed in curing me of eventually returned.
The rational response to four years of zero progress is not to delude yourself with talk of plateaus but to give up and I did for a short while but for some reason I just can’t mange it.
There is a very significant difference between your study an mine and that is the vast amount of reading aloud you have done. I suspect that represents a huge amount of comprehensible input. I have attempted that before I get to understand what I am saying it gets tedious and then my mind wanders. The images still go to my eyes, some low level part of my brain converts that into phonemes and my mouth responds but the language part of brain is pondering something quite different. You have succeed because for you pronunciation itself is fascinating but I just can’t find it interesting. You also record what you read aloud which wasn’t possible for me. Now that I have a new computer I intend to buy a microphone so that may change - we’ll see.
Please explain to me how do you think I read the first book of Anabasis without encountering real Greek? You might have got the impression that I only skimmed thru the Anabasis because I skimmed through the bit of Anabasis you suggested to me. That is not how I normally read Xenophon. I normally look up every word I don’t know and make sure I understand every last bit of the syntax. Often at this point I still do not understand it so I check the translations. I then go thru it again to see if I now can wring some understanding from it and I only go on when I am sure that I fully understand it and why it means what I think it does. Sometimes I still do not understand and I decide I must make a post on textkit. I first write I out my best guess at a translation because when I post I want those who see my post to be able to see where I am going wrong. Often that writing-out resolves the problem but occasionally it doesn’t so then I post.
I was fully expected that when I started reading real Greek it would be laborious but if is still just as laborious after four years why should I expect any improvement in the next four years?
Of course people who have better competence have read more Greek than me - they read faster.
The first book of Anabasis represents about 40% of the extant texts but taken all together it is less than the size of a the kind of short novel that I could read in a day if it were in English so yes I would be astounded if they have not read a great deal more than me.
I have stated several times how much time I have devoted to reading the extant texts. Why do you keep ignoring that? Why you keep telling me to do what I tell you I am already doing?
I do intend to keep at it with Claxton that is to say to keep reading Xenophon’s Hellenica . You theory that my problem is that I waste to much time reading “phoney” Greek has a flaw. There is too little easy Greek around for it to take up more than a fraction of time I have spent reading real Greek. More’s the pity.
And no I have not spent four years studying Krashen. Even for the last four days I have tended to watch his videos while eating a meal when I would not be studying Greek anyhow.
You both have been giving me advice on basis of a belief about how I am studying that bears no relation to what my reality actually is. I put that down to how difficult it is to convey things over the internet rather than that I am suffering delusions and that what you tell me I am doing is correct.
“Nor could my driving instructor understand why I kept repeating the same mistake despite repeated corrections. Eventually he lost his temper which I take as a sign that I am not typical - driving instructors who shout at their pupils soon run out of customers.”
No-one here has lost their temper with you, but it seems to me that you are “not typical” either of people who try to learn to drive or of people who try to learn ancient Greek—or not of those who succeed. You are like me with physics—I get so far and no further. Let’s face it, with some people Greek just does not click. It’s possible you’re one of them. There’s no disgrace in that, only a lot of frustration. If you’re determined to persevere, I’m sure you’ll continue to find people here willing to try to help you. I’ve tried quite hard myself, as you know, but failed. But I do think you’re wrong to blame your relative lack of progress on the lack of suitable materials, and sometimes we just have to admit defeat and move on—as I’ve had to do with physics. There’s more to life.
Self confidence is the most important thing you need in a learning task but there comes a time when encouragement is just giving false hope. Thanks for you for your honesty and for advice that seems well founded.
But am I atypical of those who study Ancient Greek? You do quickly qualify that by saying “of those who succeed” but that is a very important qualification. What proportion of those who set themselves the task learning to read Greek succeed? I have been trying to find this out and no one seems to know. The very fact that there is so little interest in that question speaks volumes. Anecdotal evidence suggests that success is very low. I have been trying to get the SPHS to look at this but though they are very friendly they don’t seem to grasp what I am suggesting.
If you have evidence that success in teaching Ancient Greek is in fact quite high then please cite it but from the fact you felt the need to make the qualification above suggests that even you suspect that success is low and that I am more than typical.
Given that should you not entertain the possibility that Stephen Krashen might be right and that grammar methods are a very inadequate method of teaching and that far and away the most effective method is giving students access to graded readers?
I am especially concerned for you to at least consider this because with your command of Ancient Greek you would be able to write excellent Ancient Greek graded readers.
Oddly, were Krashen here, he would probably give the same as advice as you (just for a different reason). Because I do not have access to comprehensible input I am unlikely to succeed.
It’s just that some find ancient Greek harder to learn than others. No-one finds it easy. Beginning students often quickly find that Greek is not for them, and turn to more congenial pursuits. Others take it in their stride but want no more than a term or a year of it. Others again, a minority, want to take it to a higher level. You are unique in my experience in having devoted so much time and effort to Greek without having more to show for it. I don’t say this to put you down, I trust you understand, but you asked for a comparative assessment. But you shouldn’t underestimate what you have in fact learnt, which is a lot.
That is what I was suggesting. I am typical of those who “quickly find that Greek is not for them” though in fact my first year went swimmingly. I first hit a problem when reading “Greek Unseen Translations” . The GCSE bit was fine but as soon as I got to the AS part I found myself in trouble. It was like there was a suddenly an unbridgeable chasm and it simply hasn’t got noticeably more bridgeable since. I only differ from them in that I didn’t give up at that point. I am suggesting that if there was enough material to provide stepping stones between different levels many of those who found Greek was not for them would have continued and achieved competence. The other group who simply chose to do other things despite not encountering problems would not of course be affected. And no I don’t take it as a put down – you are saying I am unique in my persistence which is hardly a put down.
Thanks for reminding me of that and I have learnt quite a lot about Ancient Greek but it doesn’t seem to translate into being able to read any faster so I tend to regard it as of no account. But is exactly what Stephen Krashen predicts. Learning is very limited and acquisition only occurs when what is being read allows the reader to concentrate on the meaning rather than the form.
As you say nothing about Stephen Krashen it is hard for me to work out why you do not wish to engage with his ideas. You do both agree on production. I have for long argued here on the value of writing and speaking Greek where as you have been firmly skeptical of its value. Krashen is very firm in saying that speaking and writing do not aid acquisition. It is listening and most of all reading that allows competence in speaking and writing to be achieved.
I’m terribly late to this discussion (as usual), but as someone mentioned Hillard & Botting, I thought I’d drop in a plug for their Elementary Greek Exercises, which are great, but which until recently suffered from the lack of an answer key. I have remedied the deficit, and I’ll gladly send colleagues a PDF upon request. Or you can buy the key from Amazon if you’d like…
Another late addition if somebody still wants graded “comprehensible” input:
Charles Anthon. A Greek Reader, Selected Principally from the Work of Frederic Jacobs. Harper and brothers. New York. 1840.
There are amply notes after the texts, if you want to try the Greek, then engage with some phrases logically to build up encyclopedic knowledge in English, then go back to engage with the texts again.
This is not specially written Greek but extracts from the extant sources that Charles Anthon deemed to be easier. It does include some preparatory exercises of sentences that might be expected to be easier. They were not even close to being “comprehensible” input for me. The first three sentences were not complex but the vocabulary was a bit obscure. The forth sentence defeated me - even after I had looked up the words.
I found , that when compared to the original authours, there is a degree of smoothing (or what you might call internal contextualisation) to allow excerpts to make sense. Things like writing a noun instead of a pronoun, when the referent of the pronoun falls outside what is quoted in the reader, and other ways of making the passages comprehensible.
You are right - knowing Βίων was a person and not translating it as something like “of lives” makes a huge difference. However, I no longer believe that notes help at all - as soon as you resort to notes your language faculty goes AWOL.
While it is possible to select sentences from the extant texts that are reasonably simple in syntax, doing so inevitably means that you end up with sentences that are stripped from context so their communicative value is impaired and the learner is deprived of the assistance provided by contexts.
I do appreciate the trouble people have taken resolve the difficulties I have had with sentences but no longer believe that such help actually does anything to help me to internalize the language. The rules in grammar books bear no relation to grammar that is hard wired in our heads and only way to internalize that is input (and for Ancient Greek that really means texts) that is communicative. Stuff that you finally get after looking up the words and reading the notes and getting explanations from others does not help. I have tried that sufficient number of years to be certain of that. The Greek I have internalized had been the easy stuff because I have been exposed to simple communicative texts that have enabled me to do so but I have made zero progress since then because everything else is for me too difficult to be communicative.
Stephen Krashen’s hypotheses about learning are on the money, in my opinion, for languages where comprehensible input at a level of i+1 exists. Texts at such levels for Ancient Greek do not exist for me in the sense that you and Krashen and I use the phrase “comprehensible input.” *
Existing readers that are intended to be easy are either too difficult or are too silly or mindless or trivial to me to be interesting to me and apparently to you. My way around this is to find texts in short, palatable packets that I like (once I understand them after painstaking labor and using whatever aids I can find). And then I read them over and over again until I get them fixed in my head. The key is that I have to really, really like the texts.
Texts that I personally find interesting enough to read over and over include parts of Herodotus, parts of Homer, Diodorus Siculus and the Greek Anthology. Claxton’s Attica is quite good, though sometimes she helps with easier texts and leaves harder texts to the reader, which is getting it backwards, to my mind.. Steadman’s texts are good for me, too, though reading them just once is not enough for me.
Edited to delete an unneeded reference to an Ancient Greek translation of Harry Potter.
What proportion of those learning a dead language such as Greek and Latin, could more easily fill a page from memorised texts, rather than memorised grammatical tables? Rough guess?