21–30 of 79 posts
I read this whole article like you were going to teach them Ancient Greek, but now I'm guessing modern is more likely? Anyway, some of my strongest language class memories from college are from translating parts of the Odyssey and New Testament.
Get a decent Greek grammar book and go through the first couple chapters, even if you don’t plan to complete the book. After completing the exercises you’ll be amazed by how quickly the Greek alphabet stuck. Repeat every 10 years if necessary.
The problem is that the ancient and modern Greek alphabets are slightly different. The ancient pronunciations map more easily on to our alphabet. I find the modern ones less intuitive e.g. beta being a V sound. There is an example below, where someone writes Bravo in modern Greek, and uses "mu beta" for the "b" sound and "beta" for the "v" sound.
Greek: an Intensive Course by Hansen and Quinn.
Basics of Biblical Greek by William Mounce
Both are standard texts with solutions easily available online.
Get a decent Greek grammar book and go through the first couple chapters, even if you don’t plan to complete the book. After completing the exercises you’ll be amazed by how quickly the Greek alphabet stuck. Repeat every 10 years if necessary.
The problem is that the ancient and modern Greek alphabets are slightly different. The ancient pronunciations map more easily on to our alphabet. I find the modern ones less intuitive e.g. beta being a V sound. There is an example below, where someone writes Bravo in modern Greek, and uses "mu beta" for the "b" sound and "beta" for the "v" sound.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, they should mark the Greek alphabet as a mandatory prerequisite for college math. It had an unreasonable effect on how quickly I was processing notation-heavy math after learning some Greek for going on a trip over there.
As I say above, the issue is that modern Greek pronounces some letters very differently. We use the classical pronunciation in maths etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is about memorizing foreign letters.
No it's not. It's about teaching letter forms to kids.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it's not. It's about teaching letter forms to kids.
… which heavily involves memorizing foreign letters. English and German mostly share the same alphabet, though, which suggests that the person asking the question hasn’t quite grasped the point. That’s what I was trying to get at in my comment.
If you tried to teach English-speaking children with words that start with that letter in German, you'd probably confuse them quite a bit.
Very handy. My math education would have gone much better if my notes weren't full of "lambda is the half stickman; sigma is upside down Q or broken E" and other really silly things
But when the probability theory class started, everyone found themselves in one of two groups: those who could reliably draw "ξ", or those who instead drew some random snaky thing which probably does not even have a proper Unicode representation. I spent half an hour finally memorizing how the damn thing is actually written to move myself from the latter group to the former.