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:
εὐχαριστῶ ὑμῖν τοῖς ἐμοῖς φίλοις.
ἔρρωσθε,
Ἰάσων τοῦ Ἰωάννου
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:
- Go over our translations of the exercises for each unit, including translation into English and also into Greek.
- 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.
- Verb drills to review forms quickly from memory.
- Augmented readings in the Greek New Testament and soon other Greek works.
εὐχαριστῶ ὑμῖν τοῖς ἐμοῖς φίλοις.
ἔρρωσθε,
Ἰάσων τοῦ Ἰωάννου
It's difficult to bring H&Q to life. I've been meandering through it for some review. I think using augmented readings is a good strategy for complementing it.
ReplyDeleteWe're doing three things in our meetings, which will apparently last two hours: (1) reading a chapter out of the New Testament [eventually from other texts]; (2) doing all of the Greek-to-English and English-to-Greek translations orally; and, (3) doing flash form drills orally.
DeleteWe both feel pretty comfortable reading the NT in Greek, so we figured that this would be a good starting place for just practicing reading aloud. I know that it's not going to present the types of forms that we're learning, but we figured it would be a good supplement as we get started. I would like to change it to Κύρου Ἀνάβασις (Xenophon) after we read a couple of books. Right now we're doing Galatians (which will be done quickly). We're reading it aloud in Greek, translating it on the fly and discussing it. I think we might do Hebrews next and then leave the NT.
We're working through the translation exercises individually through the week, then we don't look at our work when we meet. This way, the exercises are not exactly "unseen," but we're not using tools or trying to pull things out of thin air either. It gives us a chance to look at the exercises afresh and perhaps bring up problems that we had and work through them together.
The form drills are to learn to more readily produce the forms without taking much time. We drill forms of specific verbs or nouns so as to refresh the material and be more ready with English-to-Greek translations. We might eventually add more than just specific forms (perhaps the conditional structures and other things like this). I can't be sure yet.
I'd like us to be able to use ΣΧΟΛΗ to post some compositions for each other, but I'm afraid we wouldn't have any feedback from the peanut gallery, given that the site is near completely inactive right now.
Do you have any good (not-too-difficult) texts you would suggest for those who are still trying to wean themselves off of the NT κοινή?
Thanks for commenting!!