Thursday, March 09, 2006
Reading the Bible and teaching biblical languages ::
Idle Musings reports by means mainly of a long quote Carl Conrad, writing on the B-Greek list, about the teaching of Greek. It is good stuff. AKMA has a fine rant, stimulated by the same source.
It's time for the revolution! Teaching students that reading (which should he hearing anyway, but that's another story;) language is like decoding a cipher is plain wrong. At least a generation of teaching Hebrew and Greek has done as much harm as good, and maybe more. Language is a social system, not a mathematical one, we learn language like we learn friendship, by doing it, not by reading books about it. Practice first, theory follows.
On a positive note, AKMA mentions Randal Buth's exciting work teaching biblical languages in a better way - it is possible!
Non-commercial Advert
The Hebrew Vocabularies Project which I've mentioned before will possibly help a little with this, it will make vocab learning a fuller and (slightly) more rich and natural experience. If you are teaching biblical languages take a look... No Greek as yet, but the engine is there so you could easily build on the technical work we've done to start a Greek Vocabularies Project...
¶ 7:15 AM
[to Del.icio.us]
Idle Musings reports by means mainly of a long quote Carl Conrad, writing on the B-Greek list, about the teaching of Greek. It is good stuff. AKMA has a fine rant, stimulated by the same source.
It's time for the revolution! Teaching students that reading (which should he hearing anyway, but that's another story;) language is like decoding a cipher is plain wrong. At least a generation of teaching Hebrew and Greek has done as much harm as good, and maybe more. Language is a social system, not a mathematical one, we learn language like we learn friendship, by doing it, not by reading books about it. Practice first, theory follows.
On a positive note, AKMA mentions Randal Buth's exciting work teaching biblical languages in a better way - it is possible!
Non-commercial Advert
The Hebrew Vocabularies Project which I've mentioned before will possibly help a little with this, it will make vocab learning a fuller and (slightly) more rich and natural experience. If you are teaching biblical languages take a look... No Greek as yet, but the engine is there so you could easily build on the technical work we've done to start a Greek Vocabularies Project...
¶ 7:15 AM
[to Del.icio.us]
