Advice on Koine Greek reading fluency?

[mothcorrupteth]

No, I was debunking an unqualified generalisation...

Another thing that's useful specifically with κοινη is that you can cheat and use Modern Greek learning resources (like Pimsleur!)... But Modern Greek vocabulary is mostly spelled the same way it was 2000 years ago. The main differences are pronunciation, the loss of a dative case, and the replacement of future tense and infinitive forms with modal particles.

Look, I don't care about being right, man, but if you do, I think you need to read the people you try arguing with a little more carefully.

If you have something more reliable than anecdote to contradict what I'm saying, I'm honestly all ears. Because what I care about is finding what works and helping people by sharing it. But I'm not seeing that, at the moment.

 

[Radagast]

Look, I don't care about being right, man, but if you do, I think you need to read the people you try arguing with a little more carefully.

I really don't care to debate you. In fact, I have no interest in your opinion at all.

A post was made saying the main differences between Koine and NT Greek were "pronunciation, the loss of a dative case, and the replacement of future tense and infinitive forms with modal particles." I pointed out that the meanings of some words had also changed over 2000 years (spelling has changed too, e.g. δένδρον to δέντρο, but that was noted).

If anyone wants to ignore the masses and masses of really good resources for Koine Greek and try and make sense of the New Testament using the far less useful teaching resources for modern Greek, I'm not going to stop them. I just think it's bad advice.

 

[mothcorrupteth]

If anyone wants to ignore the masses and masses of really good resources for Koine Greek and try and make sense of it using the less useful teaching resources for modern Greek, I'm not going to stop them.

But you see, that's where you've been misled. If you want to build fluency, there are really only two ways to do it if you don't have a community of native speakers on hand: communicative language teaching and audiolingual lessons. The first involves intensive group work with other learners. The second involves intensive all-oral translation drills. Nobody that I've ever met teaches κοινη or עִברִית that way or offers materials that do it, because none of the seminaries pay any attention to the fields of applied linguistics or behavior analysis. They all still use the dated, textbook-based grammar-translation approach that fell out of favor around the time we were kicking the Nazis out of power.

On the other hand, there are a TON of communicative and audiolingual resources available for Modern Greek, if you're willing to learn that first and then backtrack through the differences to κοινη once you're fluent. At that point, it's like going from German to Dutch (two very close, almost mutually intelligible languages), and in the meantime, you've been able to understand 90%+ of κοινη, so now all you're doing is learning the uncommon terms and gaining the reconstructed accent.

 

[mothcorrupteth]

Coincidentally, Donovan Nagel over at the Mezzofanti Guild just posted on this:

Does Learning Koine Greek Benefit Modern Greek (Or Vice-Versa)?