Advice on Koine Greek Experiment

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Yunus39
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Advice on Koine Greek Experiment

Postby Yunus39 » Thu Sep 23, 2021 1:16 am

I am hoping to begin a 500 hour experiment in Koine Greek soon. I am starting from scratch. I was inspired by my experience with GPA and this video:


And these videos:



My current thought is to take 10 hours to learn the alphabet and work on sounding out some basic words and sentences (I will probably use Ankhi for this). Then to do about 300 hours of just "chunking" with both audio and reading. I might mix in some Ankhi. After those 300 hours, I would go back to reading with audio and/or the listening reading method to see how my reading was doing and THEN read the two beginning grammars I have (Complete New Testament Greek by Betts and Learn New Testament Greek by Dobson) and work on reading the complete NT for the next 100-150 hours.

What do you think? For those who have learned NT Greek on their own any hindsight to offer?
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Re: Advice on Koine Greek Experiment

Postby Steve » Thu Sep 23, 2021 3:18 am

I first starting learning Koine back in the early 80s using a traditional approach. I spent the next couple decades working at it on and off via memorizing and re-memorizing grammar tables and vocabulary lists (which is pretty much the standard approach in most Koine courses and the advice pretty much everyone gives). About 25 to 30 years in, I realized I hadn't significantly improved after the first year or so. I also realized at the rate I was going that I'd be lucky to work through perhaps a few hundred pages in my entire life. I never did break out of the pattern of bursts of enthusiasm followed by slowly burning out.

To make a long story short, I ran across independent language learners and sites like this one. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why some people were successful at language learning and others (like me) didn't make much progress in spite of a lot of time and effort. The key is that successful language learners use methods that build the right structures in their brain for using a new language whereas unsuccessful language learners use methods that build structures in their brain that think about the new language in their native language. In other words, I spent a couple decades looking at a Greek word and analyzing it while thinking in English. I was spending virtually all my time thinking in English about Greek rather than using methods that built structures in my brain that reacted directly to Greek. When I started spending my time practicing listening and reading skills, I got better at listening and reading. In the past, I just had gotten better at more quickly looking up words in lexicons and thinking about what part of a table a particular word fit into.

If I had to start learning Koine from scratch now, here is the approach I'd take. I'd spent most of my initial time doing some combination of repetitive listening to Greek (modern recordings of ancient texts), speaking along with it, following along with an interlinear, and reading the interlinear. I'd adjust the relative amounts of listening, chorusing, following, reading, etc. based on how familiar a passage was becoming. I'd start off with perhaps 30 to 60 seconds of audio (maybe a few sentences worth), repeatedly cover it until it started to feel familiar. In other words, I could hear it or read it and I'd mostly know what it means. This might take a couple of days or more, and then I'd be reviewing it as well as moving on to the next 30 to 60 seconds or so.

The main resources I'd use at first would be the audio, an interlinear, the actual text, and a nice introductory grammar book. Using a software editing program like Audacity allows very good control over the audio so individual words, phrases, sentences, or short passages can be trivially looped and controlled. If I was spending 30 minutes in an evening on Koine, I'd probably spend 20 to 25 minutes doing some type of listening, reading, etc. and the other 5 to 10 minutes looking at the grammar book. I would NOT spend much effort memorizing things. My focus would be on the repetition of listening, reading, etc. so that what I was hearing and seeing was starting to become more and more familiar. Rather than a traditional approach of memorizing the alphabet and then slowly and painfully trying to pronounce words (likely using the phonemes of your native language), listening to decent audio helps you internalize a consistent pronunciation along with phrasing.

Since you said Koine, I'm assuming you're interested in reading NT and early church fathers. I found the first few chapters of the gospel of John as a good text to start with due to fairly basic vocabulary, as simple grammar as there is to be found, and a nice range of grammatical structures ranging from narrative to dialog. George Ricker Berry's Interlinear Greek NT is out of copyright and free PDFs of it are available online. I like those old interlinears from over a century ago which were hand edited rather than modern ones that are mostly computer generated. I personally liked the Spiros Zhodiates' audio of the NT. It's a modern pronunciation but I liked his style. It's pretty cheap online to get the MP3 CDs. There's also free audio of John on Librivox (at one point found erroneously listed under "modern greek" rather than "ancient greek"). The female narrator (native Greek speaker I believe) has a pleasant voice and uses a modern pronunciation. There's also a free Greek recording of the NT at a defunct site called GreekLatinAudio.com. All those recordings are archived on another site now. The narrator has a native southern US accent but consistently uses a Greek accent that seems somewhere between modern Greek and reconstructed Koine vowels.

Stephen W. Paine's Beginning Greek: A Functional Approach is a nice introductory grammar book to use in conjunction with listening/reading methods. The book starts with John 1 and slowly introduces grammar along with working through the first part of John. For me, using something like Paine as a supplement to explain what I've already listened to and become reasonably familiar with works better than reading the textbook right away. I find that I need to do a lot of listening/reading to get my brain settled into Greek or else reading the textbook creates English interference where I start thinking in grammatical explanations and terms rather than reacting to the Greek itself. I would NOT do any memorizing of lists or tables (ignoring Paine's directions to do so). I'd also ignore the sections on pronunciation and accent at first. I'd learn the alphabet via exposure to the audio and seeing the interlinear rather than memorizing it.

My opinion is that most people wanting to learn Koine for NT purposes would be better served starting with methods that directly build reading skills and continuously improve and build on that. Good comprehension is a natural and eventual result of doing this. This stands in stark contrast to most Koine methods, courses, etc. which have the initial goal of perfect translation of each and every word and phrase from the beginning. My opinion is that this is backwards and that translation skills would be better built on existing brain structures for reading Greek. The reality is that the majority of Koine students working from a translation approach never develop any reading skills (other than painfully translating word by word and then trying to piece together words and phrases into sentences).

I'm happy to answer any further questions or anything.
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Re: Advice on Koine Greek Experiment

Postby Yunus39 » Thu Sep 23, 2021 3:22 am

Steve wrote: I'm happy to answer any further questions or anything.


Thanks, a very helpful response. What you recommend is very close to what I was planning with "chunking," or working with short clips of audio/text repetitively. I will reread your reply several times and replan before starting my project. Yes, I am primarily interested in reading the NT and then later the Fathers.
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Re: Advice on Koine Greek Experiment

Postby einzelne » Thu Sep 23, 2021 3:24 am

What is "chunking"?

Also, are you planning to use the interlinear translation of the New Testament for that? It's a good tool
Consulting a frequency dictionary at the initial stages is also a good idea. (No need to cram everything, just to get the idea what are the most important words)

I don't see any good reason why do you need to wait 200h before opening a grammar book. Actually, I would start with skimming through a short grammar reference book, just to get a general idea of the grammatical structure of the language (again, no need to cram all grammar tables) and would consult a more detailed grammar/textbook along the way.

Even if you're not planning to speak the language (and why should you since you're interested in Koine), shadowing and repeating sentences out loud (without looking into the text) would significantly accelerate your progress.

Disclaimer: I only dabbled with Greek, but I think when it comes to learning languages, the general principles are pretty much the same.
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Re: Advice on Koine Greek Experiment

Postby Yunus39 » Thu Sep 23, 2021 3:45 am

einzelne wrote:What is "chunking"?


See the videos above. It's essentially working with a single sentence or clip less than a minute in length. You would listen or listen and read together 100-1000 times. You also "shadow" that chunk and play with it as well, but the idea is to spend a significant amount of time and reps with a very small piece of content.

Thanks for your thoughts!
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Re: Advice on Koine Greek Experiment

Postby Yunus39 » Thu Sep 23, 2021 3:50 am

einzelne wrote:Disclaimer: I only dabbled with Greek, but I think when it comes to learning languages, the general principles are pretty much the same.


Love your avatar by the way. We bears should stick together.
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Re: Advice on Koine Greek Experiment

Postby guyome » Thu Sep 23, 2021 7:10 am

I don't know enough about chunking to comment on that but you may be interested in the Polis method (I see only the first volume on their website but can find three on Amazon...).

https://www.polisjerusalem.org/resource ... anguage-3/
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Re: Advice on Koine Greek Experiment

Postby Beli Tsar » Thu Sep 23, 2021 11:18 am

Koine was the first language I learned, and certainly I learned some of the lessons the hard way. That said, I think the problems with learning it are greatly exaggerated. If you want to read the NT, or even somewhat beyond in the Apostolic Fathers and perhaps some Papyri, it's just not that hard (compared to other languages) to get to a decent reading standard.

Yes, you hear about lots of people who never get beyond puzzling through sentences like mathematical puzzles, but on closer inspection, when I actually chat to such people, they've never actually tried reading daily for a substantial period. On the other side, I know multiple people who have learned it in their spare time and read regularly.

But realistically, the grammar isn't hugely complicated; the vocabulary is extremely limited compared to learning to speak/read novels; and the resources designed to help you transition to reading are excellent. With a limited corpus, you can know literally every word once you have 6000 vocab items - which won't get you that far reading modern novels in any language. And tools like frequency lists are enormously more helpful in a limited corpus, too.

Personally if I was starting again, I'd start from Attic Greek - substantially harder, but it gives you a deeper flexibility, more possibilities for reading, and a better overall mastery. But if I was learning Koine only, I'd definitely start with one of the better new textbooks.

Those textbooks aren't ideal, but there are some increasingly good ones out there. If I was learning now, I would probably use Rodney Decker's Reading Koine Greek or Merkle & Plummer's Beginning with New Testament Greek. You can find excellent reviews of these and others at [url]masterntgreek.com[/url]. Then I'd bootstrap another few hundred words by frequency with Anki/Memrise and start reading from a Reader's Greek New Testament, either the UBS or Tyndale House editions, both of which give footnoted help with vocab and parsing. They are lot easier to genuinely read from than an interlinear, which can be a real barrier to proper reading. There are excellent lists of Bible books by difficulty which can help you to tackle them in the right order (and which I can look out if they'd be helpful). Then, tackling book by book, with repeated reading of each passage over three days, you wouldn't take long to get to solid reading.

If you want a light grammar you can work through quickly and get into other methods then Reading Biblical Greek from Gibson and Campbell and Dobson's Learn New Testament Greek are the most interesting looking options.

Alternatively, there are free resources designed to help you read - the app 'Greek New Testament Reader' on Android (not sure about iPhone); the brilliant website [url]stepbible.org[/url], and others.

There is a real lack of good audio - there are those mentioned above, and they are worth trying, and I would use them if I was starting from scratch, but I haven't found something that really satisfies.

To sum up, if you want to do the chunking thing as an experiment, that sounds really interesting and I'll be eager to see what your results are. If, on the other hand, you are thinking of trying this method because of people (like the Mezzofanti podcasters) saying that the current method is broken, that you can't learn Greek that way, or even that it's a really bad, slow method, I simply disagree with them.

I'd love to see better Greek teaching, but I managed to use a textbook substantially worse than any of the above, when I had no grammatical knowledge whatsoever, no language experience, and was learning vaguely on and off without any real discipline, and I still managed to get to the point of comfortably reading every day.
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Re: Advice on Koine Greek Experiment

Postby Yunus39 » Thu Sep 23, 2021 12:12 pm

Thanks!
I will be looking at your post again as I plan. Part of the point is to do an experiment with "chunking." I recognize a lot of the resources you mentioned, perhaps we have been listening to some of the same people.

The "experiment" part is doing a lot of work without any vocab or grammar. Just audio, the text, knowing the English meaning, and repetitions. As an experiment I'd like to do a lot of that on the front end before I touch a grammar. What I'm thinking of, based on the responses above, is to pick a content goal i. e. chunk through 1 John and the entire Gospel of Mark, and then re-evaluate.
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Re: Advice on Koine Greek Experiment

Postby einzelne » Thu Sep 23, 2021 1:28 pm

Just to add to Steve's and Beli Tsar's suggestions which I think are pretty solid.

To me "chunking" looks like making your own Assimil audio-files for constant reviewing. It makes total sense to me.
Thought I would be suspicious about the claims that teaching is broken, grammar is overrated or you need to learn languages "like a child".
By nature, we are pattern-seeking animals. A good grammar book gives you an overview of the existing patterns, a good textbook introduce them gradually, starting from the most important ones (well ideally). You can, of course, try to play a sudoku game with Greek texts and deduce the grammar patterns by yourself but if your ultimate goal is to read the New Testament ASAP, I wouldn't waste your precious time by trying to invent the wheel.

Beli Tsar rightfully mentioned earlier: don't approach grammar as mathematical problems. You read the explanation of a certain grammar feature, look at sample sentences and repeat them (by rereading, relistening, and speaking out loud) till they get deeply ingrained in your memory and become automatic. So, it has to be automatic but you need to understand the pattern first, otherwise repetition would become a mindless drilling.

If there are translation exercises in your textbook, don't do them. Rather, check the keys to them and write in two columns (Greek - English) and, again, repeat them. For reading purposes it's more than enough. And if the textbook doesn't have keys to exercises, find the one which has. (Alternatively, you can make it yourself by using small chunks of the original New Testament text)

PS. You will find a lot of heated debates about Greek pronunciation. I don't have any skin in the game but if for some reason you will choose the modern pronunciation, here's a free audio version of it which is my personal favorite: https://christthetruth.net/2012/06/23/f ... dio-bible/
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