For Teachers

Right at the outset, let me say that I am not a Greek teacher, only a Greek student who is exploring a new method to make the learning of Greek more effective. This site might best be used as a reading supplement to a regular classroom, not as a complete stand-alone course.

As a teacher you want your students to succeed. Why not apply modern language acquisition methods to the teaching of Greek? Using stories to learn a language is a natural method which everyone is familiar with. Our brains are much better suited for processing stories than for memorizing paradigms and isolated words. One of the biggest hurdles facing a beginning Greek student is learning the paradigms. This website is designed to help achieve that goal.

Advantages of using this website to teach Greek:

it provides LOTS of beginner level reading material
it practises a complete paradigm in each story
noun vocabulary is limited to 1 declension class per story
mouse-over pop-ups translate unknown words
maintains high student motivation
is more engaging
gives the student control over the lesson
each story can be changed into more than 100 different combinations

I would like to build a whole library of stories which can be manipulated by the computer. Some could be written to teach paradigms; others to teach vocabulary and grammar. In each case the human author creates a simple story and with the help of the computer this story can be re-written from many “points of view”. For this website, an author needs only to write a story once and the computer is then able to ‘re-write’ dozens of different grammatically correct versions of the same story!! This way the language learner can learn particular aspects of grammar in a meaningful context, a story. The teacher can leverage his lessons knowing that any practise lessons he creates for this method will give the student much more reading practise at the same appropriate language level. The method used here can increase vocabulary retention through controlled introduction of new information in a familiar story. Being able to control and manipulate certain elements of the story while retaining the plot of the story, controls and limits the amount of new material a student has to assimilate. At the same time, the semantic context of the story and the explicit controls give the student a familiar context in which even new word forms are immediately understood and can be assimilated! The script which manipulates the story does not change the sentence structure or sequence of the words, so you can write anything you want and in any order you wish. This allows the author write simple stories or stories to illustrate more complex grammatical rules or specific vocabulary.

Have you written any Greek stories for your students?

If you have any Greek stories that you have composed to teach Greek to your students, would you be willing to share them with others on this website? Each story can be changed into many different versions each providing a beginning student with much needed reading practise as well as introducing new vocabulary within a familiar plot. You can write it in English or Greek and send it to me and I will include it on this site.

Please contact me by clicking on the Feedback button at the top or bottom of this page. Or you can write me at: norbert dot rennert at sil dot org. Please change the 'dot' and 'at' to the appropriate symbols.

Textbooks with stories

There are very few textbooks which use simple stories to help teach Koine Greek. I have found two so far. One is “Let’s study Greek” by Clarence Story. This site contains 5 stories from this book. Another is “A Beginner’s Reader-Grammar for New Testament Greek” by Ernest Cadman Colwell and Ernest W. Tune.

Why use this approach to learning languages?

Most textbooks offer limited reading material, sometimes only phrases, to illustrate grammatical rules. The emphasis is on learning the rules of Greek or even linguistics as a means to learning the language. Knowing all the rules of a language is not a prerequisite to learning the language, just as it is not necessary to know chemistry in order to digest food. The human brain is a language processing machine. All you need is enough easy material to digest and you can learn a new language. Rules are great for summarizing the patterns of language but not the best method for learning the language.

Greek has traditionally been taught using an analytical method. Granted, there have been recent attempts to ‘modernize’ the teaching of NT Greek, but in my opinion, much more is needed to help students learn a ‘dead’ language successfully.

My decision to develop this approach for learning Greek is based on having learned several languages successfully and yet having failed to learn NT Greek in a school setting. My conviction is that some people (probably most) do not learn languages in an analytical way. Their brain does not function that way when they are learning languages. These people need a larger context in order learn a new language. In real life situations the context is very often much larger than only a story. You can interact and converse with real people in many different situations. All these contexts help a language learner remember words and link them with meaning. Reciting isolated words and endless paradigms do not help him in mastering a new language. Yet even those who like to learn languages with an analytical method will benefit from using this site. Paradigm reference charts are on each page summarizing the noun and verb paradigms in focus. What all students need is plenty of appropriate reading material that will help them assimilate the patterns so that reading becomes automatic rather than a consious parsing procedure.

Most Greek textbooks fall short in giving language learners enough reading exercises at each level. Face it, it is hard to come up with enough sample sentences which illustrate every possible permutation of grammatical forms in a lesson. Enter the computer. If the computer is given the paradigm of a particular word, it should be possible to let the computer re-write the story from another grammatical point of view. This liberates the teacher from thinking up dozens or even hundreds of repetitive sentences and allows the student to use the computer to produce them for him or her in a controlled manner.

Another shortcoming of many Greek textbooks is that they give isolated or incomplete sentences as illustrations for the grammatical lesson at hand. Most people learn language in larger chunks: complete sentences, conversations, and stories. Learning words in such a larger context is very beneficial for every kind of language learner because it is the context which gives meaning to words. To remedy this shortcoming of textbooks, it is often suggested by teachers to read as much of the NT as possible. However, this is not helpful, for one simple reason: the NT was not written to teach you the Greek language! It uses language suitable for advanced students, not beginners. Being told to read (and parse) the NT while you are still at the beginner level is like being thrown into the ocean to learn to swim! Many people give up after the first few sentences or after the first semester.

So why choose to learn or teach using this approach? This is the way young children learn to read. We give them stories with simple sentences and a limited vocabulary. We don't ask them to learn grammatical paradigms by rote and then tell them to parse each word they read to be able to understand the whole sentence! This is also how most people in the world learn their second or third language. They learn it in context, not by memorizing paradigms, vocabulary and grammar. Why not try learning or teaching NT Greek with a similar method? Granted, we cannot simulate a social environment where people speak only koine Greek. But we can provide a larger literary context in which to learn the Greek forms than has historically been the case. This website seeks to explore this approach to learning a new language.

How it works

The way this website accomplishes this is by storing the complete paradigms of the vocabulary used in the story in a database and tagging each word with appropriate tags. This allows the computer to do the grunt work of re-writing the story in a new form. I envision that teachers who would like to contribute can submit their stories so that over time many stories will be available at each lesson. I have developed a script which helps in the tagging of stories to make it as quick and painless as possible to create additional language learning material for this site.