that they come into play during conjugation/declension, rather like patchim in Korean
It's closer to this. I suppose being able to read accents might make verse easier (they sometimes tell you where the long vowels are), but that's less of an issue.
which made me lazy and is one of the things I'm trying to correct now. So yeah, I'm all about keeping everything intact from day one of instruction.
And here's where you really put your finger on it. The truth is, a person can learn quite a lot of Greek adequately without understanding the accents, which is why many teachers don't try to teach them. But sooner or later, if you're a serious student, you will realize that not knowing them is getting in your way, and then it's really hard to go back and fix what you should have learned from the beginning.
If you start really getting into the Greek, I can send you a handout that I made for my students years ago. Nobody's explanation of accents is perfect, but a lot of my students have told me that the handout helped a lot.
(I try hard to teach the accents, but I don't penalize quite as much as I should for accent mistakes, so I always wonder how much of it is sticking. Just yesterday one of my students from last year asked me an unrelated question about Greek, and when I pressed him on an accent issue, he snapped out the correct answer right away. I was so proud!)
Hey, (somewhat) unrelated question -- what are you doing to review your Latin? I mean, do you just reread the textbook to refresh your memory and try to work through the Caesar readings, or do you write out exercises/paradigms, or practice forms on a computer verb drill program, or what?
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2006-11-28 03:50 pm (UTC)It's closer to this. I suppose being able to read accents might make verse easier (they sometimes tell you where the long vowels are), but that's less of an issue.
which made me lazy and is one of the things I'm trying to correct now. So yeah, I'm all about keeping everything intact from day one of instruction.
And here's where you really put your finger on it. The truth is, a person can learn quite a lot of Greek adequately without understanding the accents, which is why many teachers don't try to teach them. But sooner or later, if you're a serious student, you will realize that not knowing them is getting in your way, and then it's really hard to go back and fix what you should have learned from the beginning.
If you start really getting into the Greek, I can send you a handout that I made for my students years ago. Nobody's explanation of accents is perfect, but a lot of my students have told me that the handout helped a lot.
(I try hard to teach the accents, but I don't penalize quite as much as I should for accent mistakes, so I always wonder how much of it is sticking. Just yesterday one of my students from last year asked me an unrelated question about Greek, and when I pressed him on an accent issue, he snapped out the correct answer right away. I was so proud!)
Hey, (somewhat) unrelated question -- what are you doing to review your Latin? I mean, do you just reread the textbook to refresh your memory and try to work through the Caesar readings, or do you write out exercises/paradigms, or practice forms on a computer verb drill program, or what?