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Using Michel Thomas to study Koine Greek | ||
Tags: Ancient Greek | Michel Thomas | ||
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| sipes23 Diglot Senior Member United States pluteopleno.com/wprs Joined 4870 days ago 134 posts - 235 votes  Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Persian | Message 9 of 13 17 August 2011 at 6:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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Have you tried finding a used copy of Athenaze and reading that? It's not perfect, but it focuses on the reading skill
—and let's face it, you're not going to be called on to speak Koine. (Not that I heed my own advice as an active Latin speaker.) You could also try Polis, available at amazon.fr, but it almost needs a teacher to go with it. I'd say that Athenaze's storyline might be interesting enough to keep you working along. Of course, if you need to read the NT for grad school, Athenaze may be less to your taste. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| AriD2385 Groupie United States Joined 4850 days ago 44 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 10 of 13 17 August 2011 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
I would like to do the same--both read ancient Greek texts and the New Testament. Would you be able to highlight what some of the differences are between ancient and koine Greek? Would knowing ancient Greek make one a better reader of koine Greek? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4909 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 11 of 13 17 August 2011 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You could get better information elsewhere, like the link to wikipedia mentioned above. However, briefly there are two main things that separate the koine from classical (Attic) Greek.
1. Koine is somewhat simplified because over time heavy use of difficult forms was falling away. For example, the NT only has one use of the optative, and all the uses by the same author: μὴ γένοιτο (may it never be) is used by Paul around 15 times. Classical also used features such as elision (blending words like the French do) far more frequently. 2. Koine is less "literary", and simpler for that reason. Apparently, for a long time scholars thought NT Greek was unique, because it doesn't really match any other literature. Except maybe Josephus and a few other Jews, so some proposed it was Hebraized Greek. But as papyri began to be found in ancient junk heaps in the late 19th century, it was found that the NT more or less matched the way ordinary people wrote. Some books of the NT are more "literary" than others, and so more difficult to read, such as 1 & 2 Peter. Other books, such as the writings of John, are comparatively easy to read. You'll notice that both differences mean that koine is easier to read than Classical. Most teachers agree that it is easier to move from Classical to koine than the other way around. [Incidentally, what I mentioned about the simple writing style of John applies equally to all of the books attributed to him, although some (many?) scholars would argue separate authorship for all of them.] EDIT: fixed the accent on μὴ γένοιτο Edited by Jeffers on 17 August 2011 at 6:29pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| VityaCo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 7081 days ago 79 posts - 86 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, Ukrainian*, English Studies: Spanish, Japanese, French | Message 12 of 13 22 August 2011 at 1:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Just for a record. According to W.C. Tranchard " Complete Vocabulary Guide to the Greek New Testament" the complete vocabulary of the NT is 5425 words, and 1066 are those that occure more than 10 times. Edited by VityaCo on 22 August 2011 at 1:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4909 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 13 of 13 22 August 2011 at 11:45am | IP Logged | |||||
That's correct, LOL. Somehow I added 10k to the total number since looking at the book 14 years ago. I'm pretty sure the 1066 number is for words that occur 10 times or more, though. It's just that in my first year of Koine, I learned all the 10x or more vocabulary, plus a selection of other words, and my cardset totalled just over 1100. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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