[B-Greek] Sing and learn NT Greek
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Thu Dec 11 05:38:47 EST 2008
from the blog
>The songs are generally just the endings without any lemmas.
> That's fine, as long as you read the booklet and understand
> what is going on, otherwise you will wonder what 313 or 212 mean
> in the participle song (it's the declension, by the way).
This can be a useful tool for a specific skill but for most people this
probably
confuses what 'learning Greek' is. It is teaching people to memorize and
apply abstract rules about forms instead of learning thru using the forms
and is exactly backwards from modern communicative language
methodologies. This is something like 'Story's' grammar mnemonics, only
in song rather than wordplay. Needless to say, that is not how successful
German programs are built. But it should help with 'parsing tests', and
if that is the goal of language testing, then the students should show
improvement.
I wrote an article for the Danker festschrift some years back pointing
out a similar problem in teaching 'a', 'e', and 'o' verbs. Teaching the rule
as the bottom line, coupled with not using the language for real
communication,
raises a generation of people who go into analysis mode (analyzing
the language rather than thinking about what they're saying) every
time they hit one of these verbs. Sure, they learn to do it in split
seconds,
but when speaking in the other direction the reality of the process becomes
clear. All of a sudden, after 30 years, a person pauses in a sentence in
order
to mentally calculate 'you were doing' (let's see, exactly where is the
accent?).
Something was built-in that was fundamentally at odds with real language
learning.
Undoubtedly, the songs will be a hit, but will students be aware of the
damage and set back from a way to fluency? Probably not, because fluency
is not a level that most ever aim at or think about.
At least James assures us that there will be no 'praise to the female
goddess',
('a' sound for 'o' in TON QEON), and that is at least a minor blessing.
ERRWSQE
IWANHS
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
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