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Effective use of Parallel Texts. | ||
Tags: Bilingual texts | Reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| pohaku Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5640 days ago 192 posts - 367 votes  Speaks: English*, Persian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 9 of 13 03 February 2010 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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"Quite generally a text is too difficult if you have to solve it like a riddle - and any teaching method that converts language learning into riddle solving is wrong."
Iversen, of course I agree with this. I've taught English as a second language, and so have direct experience with the truth of your statement. On the other hand, though, I've spent a lot of time over the last few years greatly enjoying the language riddles and puzzles involved in reading and understanding ancient poetry in Persian, and now the Arabic of 1001 Nights (which is probably a few hundred years old in the standard editions), and even a little bit of Biblical Hebrew. Particularly in Persian poetry, the authors were, to some extent, creating riddles, and reading them, for us, inevitably involves some riddle solving. Part of that is due to our lack of native fluency in the (modern?) language, but much of it is due to the authors' use of rare words, words used in odd ways, convoluted syntax, purposely obscure meanings, double meanings, and so forth. As near as we can tell, educated native speakers have significant difficulties with these texts and have to approach them as riddles, too, often disagreeing about the meaning. It's the same for native English speakers attempting to read difficult poets (even if modern) or ancient poets, whose English is much different than the English in which we're fluent. Yes, these texts that have to be solved are "too difficult," but if you want to understand and enjoy them, I see no other way than to do the necessary work, which includes solving the riddles and puzzles. In fact, these texts are usually the very reason that one is trying to learn a language like Classical Persian (or Horace's Latin or Homer's Greek or Dante's Italian) and they provide the all-important motivation for one to work through the puzzles. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| didaskolos Newbie United States Joined 6831 days ago 10 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Ancient Greek, Modern Hebrew, Sign Language, Mandarin | Message 11 of 13 04 February 2010 at 4:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Since my original post was on the verbose side, I left out a few details that may be of interest.
A post from Professor Arguelles (see the "Lessons in Polyglottery" section of the forum) is what started me down this road. He said something about each language needing a "voice" in your head. I realized that Greek had no voice in my head; only a series of images of groups of letters and an English translation. At some point too, he also commented that learning the pronunciation and rhythm of a modern descendant of an ancient language was probably a good starting point for dead languages. As someone else noted in this thread, the idea of following interlinear texts has been discussed on these boards many times. The combination of these things provided a starting point for me to work out a system that works for me. Here is a web page with some info on available NT recordings. http://www.letsreadgreek.com/Resources/greekntaudio.htm Here are a few pieces of advice that I would offer based on my experience. 1. Make sure that the audio you choose has a good rhythm. A few free audio versions I heard speak each word carefully and well separated from adjacent words. Many word groups (especially with enclitics, proclitics, and elided letters) were almost certainly pronounced as a group. In hindsight, the rhythm of the language may be the single aspect which has helped me most from the recordings which I am using. 2. Pick one of the easier NT books to start with. In "Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics" (by Daniel Wallace), there is a table (page 30) which classifies the NT books as to their literacy level. John's writings and Mark are considered to be vulgar (in the sense of being simpler and closer to the spoken language). I happened to like John's gospel so that worked well for me. When I first started looking for recordings, I spent a great deal of effort trying to determine what was the "real" way Koine should be spoken. The bottom line is that no one is sure. Also, it is likely that there were a wide range of accents across the former Alexandrian empire since Greek was a second language to many of its speakers. Given the conflicting viewpoints I read from various sources, the following (gross oversimplification) is my best guess as to the history of Greek pronunciation. Hopefully this will save someone the effort of digging through all the sites I did on pronunciation only to find there is no definite answer. There are 3 major historical divisions of Greek (which of course developed into each other over decades and centuries). 1. Classical pronunciation reflects how the Greeks prior to Alexander the Great spoke within the Greek lands. This was not monolithic but had a wide range of dialects (which was probably similar to English dialects around the world today). 2. The second major period was after Alexander's conquests when many non-Greek speakers learned Greek as a second language. The resulting common language (koine dialektos) was somewhat simplified grammatically and probably lost the tonal characteristics of the classical period. 3. As the Byzantine empire was conquered, the daily usage of Greek shrunk to a very small region and was influenced by the languages of their conquerors. This set the stage for Modern Greek with an even more simplified grammar and some changes in prononciation. The grammar and vocabulary changes from classical to koine were relatively small. The grammar and vocabulary changes from koine to modern were much larger. My best guess is that the opposite was true of pronunciation. There was a larger change from classical to koine as an influx of second language Greek speakers formed the majority of people speaking Greek. From this point on, the core of Greek speakers in the Byzantine empire had a slowly evolving pronunciation over the centuries. Later in Europe, a few scholars listened to a few of their Greek contemporaries and decided that that could not have been how classical Greek could have been pronounced. Hence, the Erasmian system was developed as a western European best guess as to how classical Greek was supposed to be pronounced. (This is perhaps a bit sarcastic, but is probably not too far off.) From what I have read, it sounds like Erasmian forms pretty much dominate Bible colleges and many classics departments. Virtually any grammar book you find will have some form of it as the "proper" way to pronounce the greek alphabet. A few classicists have tried to reconstruct classical Greek pronounciation with its tonal structure. Much of this is based on a book "Vox Graeca" (by W. Sidney Allen) which purports to properly explain how Greek was supposed to be pronounced. There is disagreement on this point. Dr. Randall Buth (www.biblicalulpan.org) uses a reconstructed Koine. This is essentially Modern Greek with some minor vowel changes. His views on the subject have heavily influenced mine. His site is interesting. Somewhere on there is a PDF with notes about pronunciation which is interesting. It appears that he is trying to teach Koine as a living language. I make no claims for complete accuracy of the above background. It's what I've tried to piece together from a number of sources that conflict with each other. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6692 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 13 13 February 2010 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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To Pohaku: I can see your point with the texts that become interesting because they are difficult, - in fact so difficult that even educated native speakers are forced to solve riddles. It makes me think of US president Kennedy and his famous dictum
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.". But riddle solving is an art form meant for native speakers and the best second language learners, not for those who still have to fight for survival in their target languages. To Didaskolos, who quotes ProfArguelles for saying "something about each language needing a 'voice' in your head". True, and sometimes you can borrow that voice from some real person. For instance I have spent some time getting a grip on Scots, and it helped me a lot to watch one TV show with Billy Connally, who apparently spoke some kind of watered down Glasgewian. But mostly my inner voice - which I deliberately let run most of the time - speaks with my own voice, and I'm fairly sure that this also will happen in those few cases where I associate the sound of a language with a certain person. Your inner voice may have an atrocious accent, and somewhere along the line you may have to reshape or even relearn it, but even a errorridden inner voice is better than no inner voice when it comes to language learning. And in the case of dead or endangered languages it isn't very important whether the accent is absolutely correct, according to some academic criterion. You test living languages by entering in conversations with natives, - if that situation never ever occurs than quibbling about details in your pronunciation is pointless. Edited by Iversen on 13 February 2010 at 9:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5422 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 13 of 13 23 April 2010 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | ||
Found the table you reference using Amazon's preview feature. In case anyone else is interested: Semitic / Vulgar Revelation Mark John, 1-3 John 2 Peter Conversational most of Paul Matthew Literary Koine Hebrews Luke-Acts James Pastorals (ie. 1&2 Timothy, Titus) 1 Peter Jude Each category is "listed in descending order of purity". Meaning, Hebrews is the most literary; Revelation is the most Semitic/Vulgar. Note, that doesn't make Revelation easiest of course, due to its symbolic genre. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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