Saturday, September 10, 2011

Immersion courses in Biblical Languages

Last year I bought Hans H. Orberg's "Lingua Latina: Famila Romana". It is basically a graded childrens book in Latin. The idea being that you learn the language (and grammar) as you go.

To be honest, I haven't pursued it as diligently as I should, but what I did read was surprisingly fun and easy to pick up.

I've heard rumblings of a similar approach in Biblical Languages, but never found the materials.

And then today I found the Biblical Language Centre

They provide immersion courses that are designed for High Schoolers and up, that aim to have you reading fluently and thinking in Koine Greek and Biblical Hebrew.
As an extra bonus, the greek audio is in reconstructed Koine instead of ridiculous Erasmian pronunciation.

Gold. Gold. Gold.

Have a listen to the sample of 1 John and imagine knowing Greek well enough to hear and understand.

Now to save up some coin.....

Probably want to check out Daniel Streett too.
ooo, and this site, where you can converse in 'ancient greek'

or these guys, 'Polis' who are offering a Masters in Ancient Languages from 2013. It looks very good, tempted.very.much

8 comments:

Luke Collings said...

Dude, if you're keen I certainly am!!!

On a related topic, I was looking up Latin resources recently and there is a bloke on Youtube who does a Latin With Virgil course, basically teaching Latin by using The Aenaed. The few that I have watched so far are most entertaining and informative.

Mike W said...

I just need to check my book budget, but I might order the Greek one from the language institute.
There's even some home schoolers in my congregation who I reckon would devour this stuff.

The polis course intrigues me. I'd love to be able to know and teach greek/Hebrew in that way. It seems like their thrust is that if you could read Greek properly, you could write something like Wallace's second year text because you just 'knew' it from your reading.

Mike W said...

Possibly the most beautiful thing with the immersion technique is that you can teach it to someone without necesserily learning their language.

You could go to Egypt or Japan or wherever and start teaching. (Although you'de need to eventually to know what kindof roadblocks they re going to face for their learning

kristan said...

Heya, yeah - this stuff is awesome. I sat on the B-Greek list all year last year and was especially interested in Randall and a few others on there who were really trying to teach Greek well like this.

I was also interested in:
http://www.guesthollow.com/homeschool/reviews/review_song_school_greek.html

It'd be cool to have my kids learning alongside everything else they were doing as though it was normal.

Mike W said...

Thanks Kristan, good to hear from you.
I'll let you know how the Randall stuff goes

jeltzz said...

Mike, I have all these (both the Randall Buth stuff and the first Polis book/audio) materials if you wanted to have a look/listen to them before purchasing.

Mike W said...

Hi Seamus, thanks for the offer.
Which do you think is more useful?

jeltzz said...

Randall Buth's stuff is more developed, and more useful on its own. I imagine Rico's Polis course would be excellent taught, but the textbook and audio by itself is probably not the most useful to the student working on their own (I have Polis Koine 1, in French though).