James Tauber

journeyman of some

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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.

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Comments (4)

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.

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.

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Created: May 5, 2006
Last Modified: May 5, 2006
Author: jtauber