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20 Days of Koine | ||
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| Sir Lunch-a-lot Groupie Canada Joined 5336 days ago 58 posts - 64 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Ancient Greek | Message 1 of 10 11 June 2014 at 5:35am | IP Logged |
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5 years ago, in my 2008/2009 college year, I studied Koine Greek. I did reasonably well
in class, though I found myself struggling with the increasing number of verb paradigms that I had to learn by the end (participles were among the most difficult). I have wanted to achieve a mastery of the basics for a long time now (that is, a mastery of what is taught in Bill Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek), but I have just never given it enough effort. So, I have decided to attempt to work through a chapter of my Greek text book every day for the next 20 or so days. Why 20 days? Well, I think 20 days is a somewhat challenging goal (the challenge will be in sticking with it) and yet short term enough that it is attainable (unlike the year-long goals that I never stick with). I will work at reaquiring vocabulary, relearning the grammar and practising parsing and translating. While my goal is one chapter a day for the next 20 or so days... I think in about 15 days I will be forced to slow that pace somewhat as I will be reaching the least familiar material (and even new material that we did not have time to cover in class) which may require more time to internalize. Once I have made it through the 20 days, I am going to step back, see what progress I have made, see what requires work and determine what my new goals are going to be from there. I have already recently reviewed a good chunk of the material dealing with nouns, and I even purchased a new exercise book as I lost my old one (Good thing Mounce's book has moved on to the third edition: This made purchasing a second edition work book much less expensive). Unlike my first attempt at learning Koine Greek, I will be insisting on working through the ENTIRE set of exercises for a given chapter. In my subsequent years of puttering around with languages, I have learned that practice is essential to attain even basic levels of proficiency. When I was taking the class, I did less than 10% of the exercises. In hindsight, I can see that this was an incredibly stupid thing to do. Resources: -Bill Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek (2nd ed.) and the corresponding workbook. -The answer key found at teknia.com Rules: It is suggested to treat the exercises like an exam and to avoid referring to the textbook while doing it. I will largely be adhering to this principal. However, if I find that I have not grasped the particular concept I am working on in a given exercise, I will stop and ensure that I know it before I carry on – I feel that to do the exercise without knowing what I am doing is a waste of time. To that end, for the most part, I am going to try to prepare myself for doing my exercises so that I do not need to look up many words. During the exercises, I will generally avoid looking up a word unless I feel that not doing so will be a hindrance to completing the exercise and getting the most benefit from it. Future Goals: Tentatively, I would like to see at some point how rapidly I can acquire vocabulary (could 25-50 words a day for a week or two be feasible? I have no idea!). From some reading I have been doing, I have also been thinking that – once I have more or less mastered the basics of Koine Greek – to perhaps expand my learning to the Attic dialect of Greek. That should, in theory, broaden the scope of what I can read and make Koine even easier. But, I am making no promises at this time. I may also see about getting Mounce's graded reader and possibly the “Beyond the Basics” textbook... but I am as of yet undecided. I will let my imagination wander for now, and see about setting additional goals once my 20 day goal is complete. So, here are to 20 days of trying to master the Basic's of Biblical Greek. May this be the beginning of a successful journey! Day 1 Today went quite well. I read through the second chapter on Greek Verbs which dealt with the present active indicative (tense, voice, mood) verbs and went through the exercises for the chapter. Overall, I seem to have done pretty well in that chapter. It helps that I have been through much of this material before. I believe, as I progress, that things will begin moving slower and requiring a great deal of effort as there is more to relearn (or learn for the first time). Day 2/3 This chapter (Chapter 17) took longer than expected. One factor was not giving myself adequate time on day 2, though I think that was a relatively minor factor. The big thing was that I realized that I needed to do more than merely review this chapter. As it turns out, I did not truly learn Contract Verbs when we went over this when I was taking Greek back in 2009. Rather, I learned it on a surface level without learning many of the nitty gritty aspects of verbs... things which – I suspect – will make the other tenses easier to grasp. So, I made myself one of my folded flash-card papers and spent a little on the evening of day 2 learning the vowel contraction rules, reviewed the end of Chapter 17 this afternoon and spent some time learning the unfamiliar vocabulary, and then worked through the Chapter 17 exercises in the evening. I definitely found some of the exercises to be challenging... but with the exception of a few mostly minor errors, I aced the parsing and translation exercises. If I am to try maintaining my sought after “Chapter a Day” pace from here on out, I think I will need to sit down with the chapter in the morning, work at learning the vocabulary and paradigms or other concepts during my work-day (e.g. In between customers), and then do my exercises in the evening. I'm not sure how this will actually work out, since I am not exactly what you might call a morning person. However, I will try and see if I can make this happen. If I find one chapter a day to be too daunting, then maybe I will scale back and try to do a chapter every two days. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Sir Lunch-a-lot Groupie Canada Joined 5336 days ago 58 posts - 64 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Ancient Greek | Message 2 of 10 12 June 2014 at 4:07am | IP Logged |
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Day 4
Well, after what amounts to 2 or so hours of work I finished Chapter 18, the chapter on the Present Middle/Passive Indicative verbs. The chapter itself was largely review, though I did pick on on some finer points that I had glossed over back when I was taking this as a class. In contrast to yesterday's chapter, I found that most of the vocabulary presented at the end of Chapter 18 was largely unfamiliar. So I had to devote some time today to learning vocabulary. Some time back, I came across a website that talked about how to memorize a text. What it suggested was that rather than reading the text over and over again to try and cement it in your memory (I have tried to memorize passages of scripture this way for Bible College courses... it is VERY time consuming), one should instead practice REMEMBERING the text. The way it suggested doing this was by writing down the first letter of each word so that a text like “Old MacDonald had a farm” would become “O M h a f”. The text serves as an agent to help you remember what the text said so that as you go through your page of letters, you are – in fact – practicing remembering what the text was (and eventually you start eliminating the letters themselves). When I was taking Greek as a class, I would go on what I dubbed “Greek Walks”, in which I would go over and over new vocabulary trying to cement it in while walking around town. After a certain point, this was no longer very effective. I believe the reason was that I was actually practicing reading and saying the word rather than practicing remembering it. So, what I have begun to do is to go over the new vocabulary for a chapter a few times at most, and then I will leave it and not think about it for several minutes. I wrote a simple program in C that allows me to input a delay time (today I was using three minutes) and when that delay is elapsed the computer will beep at me to get my attention, at which time I pull out my flash-cards and practice recalling the meaning of words (either Greek to English or – when I feel proficient at that – English to Greek). Once I have completed my review I simply hit “Enter” and the program automatically gives me another three minute countdown. This is how I practice remembering. For the most part, it seems to work okay, though I will have to see how effective this proves to be in the long run. Once I largely had the vocabulary down pat, I sat down and began working my way through the exercises. Towards the end, I was really feeling like some of the questions were really kicking my butt. There were a couple that I had no idea what to do with. As it turns out, it wasn't for a lack of having learned the material in this chapter, but for having limited how I was understanding the ways in which the dative case can be used. That was definitely discouraging, but I am sure that as I read and study Greek further, these kinds of sentences will start to make a whole lot more sense. Finally, I have decided that – if I succeed in sticking with this 20 day goal (even if I do not get quite as far as I would like in that time) – I am going to reward myself by ordering a copy of “A Graded Reader of Biblical Greek”. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4719 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 3 of 10 13 June 2014 at 3:56pm | IP Logged |
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I'll be watching your progress and shouting encouragement from the sidelines. Good
luck! I am reading Koine for the Super Challenge, and I just started yesterday by reading the first 3 chapters of Matthew. But you reminded me of my readers, and now I'm thinking I should read them first to give myself a bit of review. Regarding readers, I have "A Graded Reader of Biblical Greek" and it is pretty good. However, I think "Koine Greek Reader: Selections from the New Testament, Septuagint, and Early Christian Writers" is a better book for learners. It has several advantages: -It gives some non-NT texts which you might not have access to otherwise. It is made up of roughly 1/3 NT, 1/3 Septuagint and 1/3 early Christian writings. -Each chapter has a few vocabulary lists. One list of vocabulary to review, a list of vocabulary to learn (in the 25-49 frequency range), and a list of less frequent vocab for reference (or for learning if you know the other lists). -Like the Graded Reader of Biblical Greek, it has links to grammars. But here it is more systematic, and the main link is to It's Still Greek to Me, by David Allan Black. Basically, each chapter of the Koine Reader has you read one chapter of SGM as a grammar review. You will do well with either reader, as long as you actually read it. But the Koine Reader plus Still Greek to Me would be a one-two punch to knock you out of the beginner phase. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Sir Lunch-a-lot Groupie Canada Joined 5336 days ago 58 posts - 64 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Ancient Greek | Message 4 of 10 13 June 2014 at 9:31pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the encouragement and suggestions, Jeffers! I will definitely look into
those books you suggest. Day 5 Today (yesterday, actually... I had issues accessing the forums last night) I am one quarter of the way done my 20 day challenge! Yeah! Today's chapter (Chapter 19) dealt with the Future Active and Middle/Passive Indicative. Again, it was somewhat review, but essential review as I had forgotten a great deal of the contents. At this point, I am finding the stack of “new” vocabulary to be growing quite quickly. What I do believe I will find is that more time will need to be spent reviewing old vocabulary, which will mean either: a.) keeping my “practice remembering” timer on for longer at a time (and perhaps setting the delay to progressively longer throughout the day... hmm... I should totally add that function to the program so it will automatically do it!) and/or b.) start using a program like Anki to manage my flash cards. Since I now have a smart phone, it would not be a bad idea to start using Anki. But... I may wait a few days yet and see how my methodology pans out. Or, maybe combine my timer with using Anki. I also learned the future form of ειμι – εσομαι, εση, εσται, εσομεθα, εσεσθε, εσονται! Future Deponent Indicative (I believe)! On top of that, I also made some flash cards to learn the square of stops (if you don't know, that is where the end of the tense stem of a verb or the root of a noun is a consonant and it comes in contact with a sigma. Π and Σ become Ψ, etc. It is pretty important to know. But my first time through this text book, I tried really hard to get away without having to learn it. Now that I have learned it, it seems stupid for me to have tried ignoring it considering how EASY it was to learn. Another thing I started doing intermittently during today's exercises is trying to read and understand the texts without translating them into English first, and THEN going ahead and translating them into English. Some are a bit unwieldy for me to do this with, but I am hoping that it will help me better internalize the language and move beyond brute force parsing. Though, as has been happening with parsing nouns, I suspect that parsing the verbs will become more automatic over time. Finally, while I skipped over a bunch of noun chapters (five of them, to be exact) to dive into the verbs (My textbook and workbook are actually set up to give teachers the option of doing exactly this), I have hit the point where I will need to go back and finish up the chapters on nouns. Given that, at a glance, these chapters seems VERY much like review, and that I am reasonably comfortable with the paradigms presented therein, I MIGHT see if I can do something insane like doing two chapters a day. Though, given how long the exercises can take... this may also not happen and I might just maintain a single chapter a day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sir Lunch-a-lot Groupie Canada Joined 5336 days ago 58 posts - 64 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Ancient Greek | Message 5 of 10 14 June 2014 at 7:22am | IP Logged |
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Day 6
Well, I thought this chapter on the 3rd Declension was going to be mostly review. As it turns out, some of the material was familiar... but it was definitely not “mastered” (I use the term “mastered” fairly loosely. While I have “mastered” some of the material in other chapters to a degree, I know I am a long ways away from TRUE mastery). It was material that I only had a partial grasp upon, and very little practice with. It also pointed out weaknesses in my understanding of Greek nouns in general (in particular, the fact that I hadn't bothered to learn the true case endings independently of the paradigms). Consequently, only one chapter was completed today. Bill Mounce promised at the end of this chapter that the remaining noun chapters would be easier so there is a chance that I MIGHT be able to pull off two a day, however I am not going to hold my breath on that. While not as bad as day four, I really got slapped around by the exercises for Chapter 10. The biggest issue I had in my translations was with mixing up a few of my third declension case endings (thus highlighting why practice is so important!) and mixing up παν/πας and τις/τι. Mostly, silly mistakes. I will definitely need to review a few things from this chapter tomorrow. By the time I finished the main batch of questions in my workbook today, I definitely wanted to wuss out and stop. But as I forced my way through the additional questions I actually found it wasn't so hard or unpleasant as my mind was telling me that it was going to be. It is kind of like doing the math questions in grade school: it always seems like there are lots of them and it feels like it takes such a long time. But once you are proficient, it takes no time and almost no effort at all. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sir Lunch-a-lot Groupie Canada Joined 5336 days ago 58 posts - 64 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Ancient Greek | Message 6 of 10 16 June 2014 at 2:42am | IP Logged |
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Day 7
Well, I succeeded in getting through TWO chapters of Greek yesterday dealing with the first, second and third person pronouns. That all being said, I did skip a couple of questions at the end of the second exercise (and ignored the English to Greek bits for the time being - I may go back and do those yet). The exercises were not as difficult as the exercises from the chapter on the third declension. However, I did find some of the uses of αυτος to be stretching. I will need to go back and at least review the uses again. During church today, I pulled up the Greek of the scripture being read to see if I could follow along, and I found it less unfamiliar than before I began this challenge, though I think the biggest barrier I found was my still small vocabulary. But anyway, not a whole lot else to report for day 7. Now, to see about getting another chapter done to knock down day 8! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sir Lunch-a-lot Groupie Canada Joined 5336 days ago 58 posts - 64 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Ancient Greek | Message 7 of 10 17 June 2014 at 7:56am | IP Logged |
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Day 8/9
Well, Day 8 I wasn't feeling so great, so I wussed out at the end and only did about half of the translation exercises which dealt with demonstratives (e.g. this, that). Day 9 (today) got fairly interesting once I got into my exercises. Today's chapter is Chapter 14 which deals with Relative Pronouns and their clauses (e.g. Sir Lunch-a-lot WHO is a pretty great guy...). In reality, this is a pretty straight forward concept. I, however, had to go out of my way and make it difficult for myself. By that, I mean, I got confused by the way that the textbook says that the case of the relative pronoun depends on its function INSIDE of the clause, and yet it often looks like it had more to do with what is going on outside of the clause. For instance (please excuse the lack of polytonics... I do not yet have a means of typing them): Και ημεις μαρτθρες παντων ΩΝ εποιησεν εν τε τη χωρα των Ιουδαιων και εν Ιεροθσαλημ. (The relative pronoun is capitalized for lack of being able to put the breathing marks and accents on at this time). This translated to "And we are witnesses of everything which he did in the region of the Judeans and in Jerusalem. It almost seems like the case of the relative pronoun here has more to do with the function of the entire clause within the sentence than the function of the relative pronoun WITHIN the clause. But, if I ignore this brain game and don't over think it, things seem to translate fine. So... I think I am going to leave it as is at this time and hope that maybe "Still Greek to Me" will touch upon this or clear it up when I get that down the road. In the process of trying to clarify this, I remembered that there are lectures on the CD which comes with my textbook. While the lecture didn't cover much that the chapter hadn't already said, it was a refreshing way to experience the content of the chapter. I may start adding this to my chapter review routine as a nice way to re-enforce the material. Also, I am thinking of not doing a chapter tomorrow (gasp!). Rather, I think at this stage it would be good for me to spend some time reviewing what I have learned thus far - in particular the bits that still seem rather troublesome, as well as spend some extra time reviewing the new vocabulary I have been learning (as well as finishing that half and exercise I skipped yesterday...). Depending on how long that takes, I MIGHT try doing another chapter tomorrow. But since my evening is pretty full tomorrow night, I will probably just focus on reviewing material. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4719 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 8 of 10 17 June 2014 at 12:00pm | IP Logged |
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There is nothing wrong with giving yourself a little breathing space. Sure it might mean
completing your goal in 21 or 22 days instead of 20. But by taking a bit of time to review what you've done, you will come to the end of the process with a much more secure knowledge of the material you have studied. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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