Sunday, December 13, 2015

Diagram of Greek Nativity Tropar

I am posting this here because I have to share it with someone.

It is way too complicated for my students right now, but I went ahead and did it anyway because I find diagramming Greek sentences EXHILARATING. This image is extremely arcane; who else on the internet could possibly want it? But just in case, here it is.

By the way, I am teaching a New Testament Greek course online to Orthodox homeschoolers, via St. Raphael School. We are using the third year of this curriculum, and I think it's pretty good, if you want to spend three years learning about half the Greek you need to read the New Testament. That's not a criticism, because some people (namely early adolescents) may want to do it just that slowly.

If I had more time with the kids, I would be supplementing, however, with interlinear selections from the New Testament. I would prepare the texts such that the training wheels fall off gradually. This would get them reading the New Testament by the time they're done with this third year.

For myself, I am writing out the gospel for each coming Sunday on a piece of paper and taping it to the wall behind the table where we eat our meals. So throughout the week I read through it several times, and my husband and I chat about the words and try to puzzle things out together. This has definitely improved my reading ability, to the extent that I only have to look up a few words. Of course, I have read the text in English before the week begins, and the stories are familiar to me, so I'm not doing it totally cold. I think something like this would be a very good addition to the basic grammatical paradigm + vocabulary memorization approach that you take with most textbooks.

1 comment:

  1. How fun! I can't really make any sense of it at this point - I'm still learning how to diagram English sentences. But this is something that I totally look forward to being able to do some day.

    That's exciting that you're teaching for St. Raphael's! I was just thinking the other day about how as the kids get older and we eventually need to outsource some things that I'd like to be able to go through them. Hopefully you'll still be there :)

    And thanks for the idea of reading Sunday's gospel daily. I probably can't do a whole passage like that yet, but I may try just a verse or two to begin with.

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