Match images to words without translating first

Try to match Greek words to images without translating those words into English.

You can find this brief exercise in lesson 24 at HellenisticGreek.com. While the grammar found there focusses heavily on translation, in recognition that the primary goal of many who set out to learn Hellenistic Greek is to learn to translate Greek into English, translating is not the best way to acquire a language. In fact, if that’s all you do, you will never actually acquire the language.

For that reason, I am slowly adding exercises that require the reader to process the meaning of Greek words and phrases without having to reference English at all.

If you have to translate the Greek you are reading into English before you can understanding it, you are not acquiring Greek. You will always have to translate before understanding if you learn that way. Your goal should be to read Greek and understand it directly in Greek, without having to translate.

If you enjoy this kind of challenge, let me know and I will post more of the exercises here.

Two Items Added to the Bibliography

Today I added two items to the bibliography at Greek-Language.com. One was a paper by Paul Danove that has been around since 2013, but I have failed to add it. My apologies to Paul! 

Danove, Paul, ‘A comparison of the usages of δίδωμι and ἀποδίδωμι compounds in the Septuagint and the New Testament’ in Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts (eds), The language of the New Testament: Context, history and development Linguistic Biblical Studies 6, Leiden: Brill, 2013. 365–400.

The second is a paper published in the Transactions of the Philological Society in 2017. Dr. Stolk provides a well-reasoned look at prepositions (mostly πρός and εἰς) and the usage of the dative and accusative cases in phrases without a preposition. She challenges the widely accepted notion that increased use of these prepositions caused the eventual decline of the dative case.

Transactions of the Philological SocietyStolk, Joanne, “Dative Alternation and Dative Case Syncretism in Greek: the use of dative, accusative and prepositional phrases in documentary papyri.” Transactions of the Philological Society. Volume 115:2 (2017) 212–238.

GreekLanguage.blog

NOTE ADDED April 14, 2023: The following notice, published in 2016, remains here for historical reasons, but the domain name GreekLanguage.blog is no longer valid. I no longer own the domain name “GreekLanguage.blog”, and you cannot access this blog from there. The “Greek-Language.com/grklinguist” address still works, and it redirects to the secure homepage of this blog (blog.greek-language.com).


You can now access this blog by typing GreekLanguage.blog into the address bar at the top of your browser. GreekLanguage.blog and Greek-Language.com/grklinguist now point to the same place.

Greek alphabet etched in stone
©️Micheal Palmer

New Exercises for the online grammar

I have uploaded a recorded version of the first lesson of my online Greek grammar, including two flash card exercises to practice phonemic awareness. The open source software I used to write the old exercises is no longer updated and is not HTML5 compliant. I’m now using U5P, also open source, to write new and better exercises. The ones in this first lesson are pretty basic (flashcards) but more sophisticated exercises will be coming later in the summer.

What?! Ads at Greek-Language.com? Oh, no!

ShockedSmileyThat’s right. You see an ad in the upper right corner of the main page, just below the header. (And there’s another one on the right near the bottom of the main blog page.)

I have decided to allow a limited range of ads to help pay the expenses of maintaining Greek-Language.com, but there are a few limitations that I still insist on:

  • No ads in the grammar
  • Only ads related to the content of the page being viewed
  • Ads must be small and unobtrusive [That is… you can read the page and not be distracted by them.]

If you notice an ad that seems to violate any of these limitations, please feel free to contact me and complain!

 

Thank you for a very successful 2012

In 2012 the readers of this blog have come from 140 different countries. I want to thank you for your overwhelming support!

It has been a real pleasure to interact with such a wide diversity of readers!