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Conversation practice with non-native

  Tags: Ancient Greek
 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center Post Reply
Tolmides
Newbie
United States
Joined 3444 days ago

1 posts - 1 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Ancient Greek

 
 Message 1 of 2
06 December 2014 at 11:55pm | IP Logged 
Hello,

A friend of mine and I are trying to practice conversation in ancient Greek. Each of us have
some reading ability in the language, and have done massive amounts of work reading
aloud in a restored pronunciation (ie., Allen's Vox Graeca). He is more experienced than I
am.

What I'm looking for is general advice about conversation practice. We find that we can
communicate with each other and make ourselves understood, but only with a great deal
of error.

I had hoped to work on this correctness problem (and perhaps push ourselves) by
incorporating some of Blackie's "Dialogues for Use in Schools." This is a book from the
last century, which can be found online as a PDF, that includes a number of intermediate
to advanced spoken dialogues.

However, I am very unsure of how best to use these. We can read them to each other, but
I don't feel that we will get a great deal out of that. Our first conversation used the first
dialogue as a basis and we tried to improvise, but we would up talking about unrelated
things the entire time (and not very correctly).

If anyone has advice who on successfully using conversation and dialogues to learn other
languages (not just Ancient Greek!) please teach me!
1 person has voted this message useful



solocricket
Tetraglot
Groupie
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 3477 days ago

68 posts - 106 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Italian, Spanish
Studies: Dutch, Icelandic, Korean, Polish

 
 Message 2 of 2
10 December 2014 at 1:32pm | IP Logged 
I think if you used the dialogues just as a backbone for establishing some set phrases
and common words used in more colloquial speech (I guess as opposed to translation), then
maybe you would have more success talking with your friend. Memorizing more sentence
structures in which you can substitute words might be helpful. When I practice French in
conversation, for example, I try hard to keep the things I'm saying well in the realm of
words and structures I know very well, rather than trying to get too creative.
I agree that just reading a dialogue together would not be too much fun :)

Best of luck!

1 person has voted this message useful



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