Teaching New Testament Greek
I'm teaching New Testament Greek to a small group and tonight was our first lesson. I just talked about the history of the Greek language and outlined the (I think) novel approach I'm taking to this course.
Basically, we'll be learning inductively but with a graded series of text fragments from John's Gospel generated algorithmically to prioritize learning the words and word forms that will, in turn, mostly quickly enable reading of more text fragments (similar to the problem posed in my programming competition).
We'll still be covering traditional grammar but it will come after the grammar points have been seen in real texts a few times. There'll be a focus on reading and learning inflected forms first (and always in the context of a clause) and only abstracting lemmas and paradigms after the fact. This far more closely resembles how first language acquisition works and should lead to much quicker intuitive understanding of the language.
This is essentially an alpha test but, as a couple of the guys are remote, I'm trying to do as much via email and Web as possible and so, if all goes well, I might offer this to a broader audience online at some stage.
I'll post updates as things progress.
Comments (6)
Simeon on Dec. 4, 2006:
Sounds cool. I'm about half way through my 4th NT Greek course at uni, and i'm sure it would be easier this way round!
David on Jan. 30, 2008:
James, I have recently started teaching NT greek and am intrigued as to your algorithmic approach. Could you possibly send me what you have done, or at least list the passages in increasing order of importance?
James Tauber on Feb. 1, 2008:
David, contact me via email for more details.
David on Nov. 1, 2008:
Hi, I'm teaching my second session of New Testament Greek using Dobson's book. It uses a similar approach to what you suggest, but I'm still not quite happy with it. How successful has your method been with N.T. Greek?
I am using a similar approach to teach another languages using the direct method (no English, only the target language), which is going very well. However, the Greek class... well... I'm finding out people are slipping through the cracks and missing some important basic ideas (such as how to read the letters -- after 12 weeks...). However, they are progressing farther and faster than I have seen a non-college group learn New Testament Greek in the past.
Do you have any suggestions or outlines thus far?
Kathy on Nov. 11, 2008:
I tried learning from textbooks and got nowhere, so I dediced to try to find some Biblical Greek audio on the web. I found some great Koine Greek files and got permission from the owner to post them. Now I am very slowly pasting audio of John chapter 1 into a Greek/English interlinear online Bible. Check it out at www.BiblicalGreekAudio.com
It takes a huge amount of time to arrange even a few words with the audio, so I hope that others will find this usefull, as it is quite an effort.
I had a comment from one individual that the files were not correct Greek pronunciation, so I called Crown College in St. Bonifacious, Mn. and talked to the Greek professor there. He recited John 1:1 to me on the phone, and it sounded just like my website, except for one word.
Last Modified: May 5, 2006
Author: James Tauber
Tim on May 6, 2006:
I think the approach of starting with applications and then later moving on to analysing the general case is beneficial for areas beyond language learning. Several physics-related courses I took at uni suffered, IMO, from doing things the other way around.