Greek Lesson

Last night's Greek Lesson went well. We went through the 24 individual letters of the Greek alphabet and the combinations ει and ου.

To prepare the lesson, I ordered the letters into 5 categories of roughly increasing difficulty for readers of the Latin alphabet. I then wrote a program that, for each category, generated up to twenty word forms in John's Gospel that (a) had a letter from the category being taught; and (b) only had letters from that category or a previous one.

I think it turned out to be a great way to learn the letters because it didn't overwhelm them too much at the beginning. It still wasn't easy, though. It's sometimes hard to remember just how "foreign" some of the letters seem when you first learn them and in some cases how misleading.

One thing I learnt last night is that Americans (or at least the ones I was teaching) don't use 'revise' and 'revision' to refer to reviewing material, for example before a test. In Britain and Australia one would say 'have you revised for the test yet' or 'I have a test tomorrow so I need to go home and do some revision'. In America, it appears those terms only mean their other sense of making a change/improvement.

Of course, one might argue that a Brit or Australia means 'change/improve my understanding of the subject' but it was still interesting that my use of the term was odd to the Americans.

Oh, and thanks to Tim Wegener, who, although not part of my course, read through the material for last night's lesson beforehand and had a wealth of wonderful questions about the history of the Greek language.