More Hansen & Quinn Study

I canʼt believe that itʼs been over two years since I first posted about Hansen & Quinnʼs Greek: An Intensive Course. On my own I made it through Unit 6. Itʼs an amazing, if not quite difficult, textbook. In addition to the difficulty of it, I engaged myself in teaching Hebrew consistently every Saturday afternoon instead of studying through the Greek textbook - with the result that I didnʼt continue to pursue my Greek study. However, I have just found someone who is willing to study through the text with me, and we had our first meet-up on Skype this past Saturday. Weʼll be meeting for the second time this weekend, during which meeting weʼll be going over Unit 1.

If anyone has suggestions about how to make the grammar come to life for us, we would appreciate it. So far, weʼve discussed doing a couple of things:

1. Go over our translations of the exercises for each unit, including translation into English and also into Greek.
2. Adding a couple of our own English-to-Greek translations based on the vocabulary and grammar covered up until the unit that weʼre working on.
3. Verb drills to review forms quickly from memory.
4. Augmented readings in the Greek New Testament and soon other Greek works.

Iʼm using Quizlet to put up the vocabulary lists, together with audio for each lesson. The course is listed here if youʼre interested in looking at what Iʼve put together. Let us know in the comments if you have any suggestions for how to use the text in a better way.

εὐχαριστῶ ὑμῖν τοῖς ἐμοῖς φίλοις.
ἔρρωσθε,
Ἰάσων τοῦ Ἰωάννου

Silent Greek World

I’ve noticed recently that the world of online Greek studies has gone silent. I’m not sure if this is due to the end of the school year or if people aren’t producing as many things for online consumption as they were a couple of years ago, but it’s not just my blog that has gone silent.

Mark Lightman (Markos33AD) used to make all kinds of fun videos that he uploaded to YouTube, but his last video was uploaded more than a year ago. Similarly, the online social media site ΣΧΟΛΗ (sxole.com) has had almost no activity over the last year. It was really becoming quite popular for a while, but it’s nearly died out. The B-Greek forum has very little activity, and GreekStudy has a couple of groups currently working through Herodotus and Xenophon, but it’s also operating with limited activity. I’ve done what I can to get some activity up on ΣΧΟΛΗ recently, but nothing started up.

The only site that I’ve noticed maintaining activity is the CARM Biblical Languages forum, which is less geared at language learning and more directed at using the biblical languages to inform theological opinions. The forum has been dominated for the past couple of years by an Internet troll who calls himself “John Milton” on CARM and “Isaac Newton” on Textkit. Although he represents the worst type of person with whom to interact with regard to the Greek language, he at least keeps the CARM forum moving. It’s sad because the world would be better off without such trollish behavior, but at the same time it’s good that CARM has some activity while the rest of the ancient Greek online world has so extremely slowed down.