GandalfTheWise
In search of lost causes and hopeless battles
- May 27, 2012
- 357
- 534
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Christian
- Marital Status
- Married
I'm self-taught. I now read the NT and OT (LXX = Septuagint) in Greek exclusively. I also started learning Spanish about 2 years ago and am now reading through the NVI. The plus side is more insights. The minus side is that my recall of names and places is messed up by seeing them in various languages. I recently started priming the pump for learning Hebrew by doing a bit of listening/reading work every day to just get comfortable with it.
My level of Greek is to the point I can read narratives (i.e. Gospels, Acts, Genesis, Kings, etc.) comfortably with a good degree of comprehension. Poetry such as Job and Psalms and some prophets are a challenge yet because of the more extensive vocabulary. I have an old LXX (with English text in the margins which I glance at to refer to for more obscure vocabulary). The biggest thing is that this is now an enjoyable part of my life that is fruitful and sustainable. I probably average about an hour a day in either the GNT or LXX. I'm spending most of my time actually using Greek rather than trying to review and force myself to memorize and learn more.
How long did it take me to get to this point? I'll have to answer that in two parts. I started off doing the traditional memorize grammar and vocabulary and parse, parse, parse a text to death in order to translate it correctly. I've got most of the standard reference works, the Great Scott, Middle Liddell, BDAG, Smyth, and other standard grammars and lexicons and spent countless hours making my own flash cards and reviewing verb tables. After about 30 years of on and off hit-it-hard and then burn out and then months later restarting, I really couldn't do much with it. Every break I took, I'd forget most of the verb tables, etc. and have to review over and over. Ultimately, I don't know how many hours I spent (wasted?) over the years with little functional skill to show for it.
About 6 or 7 years ago, I ran across the web site howtolearnanylanguage.com which had a very active forum full of language learners. (Unfortunately, the owner of the site did it as a hobby and let it lapse for awhile which largely collapsed the forum activity.) A number of people on there were what I would call successful language learners. They had achieved a high degree of function in many languages. Many of them now have their own websites. I soaked up thread after thread of what people had tried and what had and hadn't worked for them. There was a lot of sorting through wheat and chaff, but a lot of good information could be found there. One scholar who has committed his life to language learning and reading classic books in their original languages freely shared a lot of his experience. His language achievements make him a credible source to listen to. One statement he made had a profound impact on my language learning. He said he found that unless a language had a voice in your head, it was nearly impossible to activate natural language processing for that language. It would remain largely an intellectual exercise. The second thing that profoundly impacted me was realizing that there is a huge difference between rote memorization of facts about a language (which was entirely what I had been doing in Greek) and actively cultivating the 4 main language skills (reading, listening, writing, and speaking). I realized that in 30 years of working on Greek, I had never consciously practiced reading. I had always aspired to "translation" as a part of teaching. I had never thought of simply being able to enjoy reading Greek for my own edification as a goal. I had assumed that reading skills would develop if only I could memorize and master enough verb tables, grammar, and vocabulary lists.
I picked up an audio of the GNT by Spiros Zhodiates (done with a Modern Greek pronunciation). It's now available on christianbook.com for about $15. Leaving aside the debate on "real" Koine pronunciation, this was the first time Greek even approached anything like a real language for me. At the same time, I started doing a lot of extensive reading and listening at same time using an old interlinear I had (laying aside all the nicer newer books I had for a time). I started processing phrases and sentences for their general meaning without worrying if my understanding was perfect and just followed along listening. Instead of an hour of time having yielded an analysis of a perhaps few sentences, I'd have gone through pages. I found that doing this had an unintended consequence of constantly reviewing the most common parts of the language in context. I wasn't memorizing disparate words and forms, I was internalizing actual Greek usage along with its meaning.
Fast forward a few years. I find that I can process entire sentences without consciously thinking about verb tables or grammar paradigms or sentence diagrams. I find that I'm naturally processing the common verb endings without thinking about them. I'm also naturally processing sentences as phrases and naturally groupings of words. I'm also starting to react to the common particles as a normal part of sentences sort of like using the Canadian "eh!". I'm sure I'd fail any Greek test that required me to actively remember various things. But, my passive recall of many things has become automatic.
I'm now on my 4th time through the LXX. This time, I'm doing more focused reading. I'll read a paragraph once. I'll then do a look up of words I didn't know with an occasional glance at grammar tables. I'll then go back and read that paragraph again a time or two until I feel like I'm actually reading it. Then, I'll go on to the next paragraph. If I start to burn out and lose focus, I'll just go back into extensive reading mode glancing at the English margin translation as needed and keep going. The key is keeping it enjoyable and sustainable so I don't burn myself out like I used to.
In the GNT, I mostly just enjoy reading the Gospels and Acts and some of the simpler epistles. I've put off putting in a lot of time in the epistles because they are a much more nuanced form of prose. I've been finding the time spent just reading is increasing my understanding without a lot of laborious rote work. Each time I go into the epistles, I find more and more just seems understandable.
I took what I learned about language learning to start learning Spanish a couple years ago. I picked up a course from Assimil (Spanish with Ease) and spent about 6 months working through it. It's a bilingual course with Spanish-only audio. The main idea is to listen and learn from actual dialogs for about 3 months before attempting to do much else. I found at the end of 3 months that I had internalized a surprising amount of common Spanish grammar. At the end of 2 years, I enjoy watching a few Spanish dubbed audio/subtitled shows on Netflix and am fairly comfortably reading the NVI. I recently got together with an old friend from Panama. She was rather surprised at my pronunciation and level for having been doing it on my own on and off for 2 years.
A few years ago, I tried an experiment with listening/reading for learning with Hebrew for a couple of weeks. I've got an interlinear of Genesis and Exodus and found a set of free audio of the OT in Hebrew on the internet. I just started listening to Genesis 1 and tried to follow the first minute or so of the audio. I went back and listened over and over. After a couple times, I started catching Elohim in the audio and could recognize it in text. I then slowly started piecing together what I was hearing with what it meant. I did not memorize the Hebrew alphabet before doing this. After about a week, I found that I could look at the Hebrew text and it prompted my memory of what I had heard. I was looking at Hebrew words and recognizing them by what sounds they reminded me of in much the same way I process english. I was even starting the catch the vowel points. I could understand the audio without looking at the text. I stopped the experiment at that point, but was pleasantly surprised by what I'd seen. This alone is not the most efficient way to learn a language, but I found that it can be a very valuable tool for internalizing a language.
I'll be taking what I've learned about language learning to hopefully be a lot more efficient learning Hebrew. My goal is to enjoy reading the OT. I picked up the Assimil modern Hebrew course and have started through that at a slow pace. I'll also be using audio of the OT (free on the internet somewhere) with a Hebrew interlinear of Genesis and Exodus that I have. I'll be focusing the majority of my time on listening and reading. Eventually, I'll figure out what the standard reference grammars are and figure out what I might want to buy later. (When I was in grad school, I knew a few people from Israel who were native Hebrew speakers. One of them gave me some recommendations. She said she didn't think modern Hebrew and ancient were all that different. She said she just read the OT without problems. It was a bit archaic to her ears, but she thought it was easily understandable.) I've found the Assimil courses very good for introductions to languages so I decided it would be a good place to start with the basic sounds and structures of Hebrew.
Anyway, my story and views on things. One of my biggest regrets in life is not knowing what I do now about language learning. If I had only known this back in my 20s... oh well. Onward and forward.
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