In a Sea of Greek: Learning Is Language
The boat motored out three miles from shore. There I dove, alone, into this ocean of Greek.
I can swim. I’m not Katie Ladecky, but I’ve got some stamina. I like to study and I love the Bible. But I’ve never swum this long or this far.
If I swim on, if I don’t give up my stroke, by God’s grace, I will reach the shore. The final exam is May 17th. But if I let up, if I just show up and stop cracking this code, I will sink.
“Swim or sink” is what I say when friends ask me,
“How goes the Greek?”
To those few of you who have prayed that my brain will soak this up like a sponge, thank you. To those of you who shake your heads, I don’t blame you. And to the three or four of you who know, it helps me to know that you know.
You did this thing. It can be done.
Apart from the 6 hours I now spend on Saturdays and the couple hours on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and the walks that now include my baggie of note card “declensions for memory,” I’ve been thinking a lot about learning, and, in particular, learning a new language.
“Learning anything is really learning a new language.” That’s what my 21-year-old nephew said when I asked him, “What’s new?” Daniel is an independent contractor. He came up for the weekend last month. I had told him about my brain full of Greek.
Learning Is Language
Watching him print invoices Saturday morning and hearing him troubleshoot a tricky dryer vent with my husband was proof that Daniel is well on his way to learning the languages of both business and remodeling.
Daniel was onto something. Whenever we go deep into a new subject, it really is a new language. It might not have foreign letters like ψ, φ ζ, or π but it is unfamiliar, and without effort and instruction, the words are meaningless.
Why Swim in Greek?
1. The Greek language is a gateway to a world I love.
It takes me one step closer to the world of the New Testament. Greek brings me closer to the original.
I told you about reason one in my last newsletter. But now two more reasons are clear.
2. Learning Greek forces me to slow down.
While this isn’t the original reason I enrolled, it only took my 20 minutes into the first class period to see this huge “why.” Learning Greek forces me to slow down, an area in which my friends know I desperately need to grow. The U.S. Department of State labels Greek as a “Category III–Hard Language” for native English speakers. I agree.
I need to go slowly and take note. They go together. Learning Greek demands that I do both. How else will I see the rough breathing mark over the alpha in ἁμαρτιῶν or the accent over the omicron here αὐτὸς or notice the same neu at the end of ἁμαρτιῶν and αὐτῶν, indicating the genitive case, also feminine and plural.
3. Learning Greek is humbling.
Dr. Moore called on me to translate and parse in the second class. My heart raced. I plotted a way of escape. The silence was deafening. No one came to my aid.
So I guessed.
“Present active indicative, third person singular?” My odds were good. Present active indicative were 95% of the verbs we knew.
“Well done, Abigail. Now what’s the lexical form?”
It hasn’t gotten easier and I have made mistakes.
Just when I get one declension down, along comes the next.
There is always the possibility of inducing pride. I must constantly be on guard for that. But so far, learning Greek has been humbling. I’ve had to depend on God for discipline to study, for a mind like a sponge, and for hooks to hang all these inflected endings on.
It is the hardest mental thing, loving God with my mind thing, that I’ve done in quite some time.
But I love it. ἀλλ ἐγώ ♥️Ελλάδας. I love Greek.
Learning About Learning
Every sentence is a puzzle to solve. The pieces fit. The word endings are nubs that make the words, the pieces, fit. Pronouns and their antecedents, nouns and their adjectives, articles and their nouns, verbs and their tenses—every inflection matters.
As a speech-language pathologist, I present word pairs to students to help them hear, and then say, difficult sounds. Minimal pairs are words that differ phonetically by only one sound. “Zoo” is different from “zoom,” and “suit” is not the same as “soup.” In Greek, Theos and Theon and Theou and Theo are all different, too.
There is nothing random about Greek, not a iota, accent or ending. Nothing.
1. Learning Means You’re Sensitive (In a Way)
But until you can hear it, it all means the same thing—or nothing. Because we need to become sensitive.
I’m starting to think that learning is simply becoming sensitive to what we were insensitive to before. The stretch and spin of my sourdough, the slight pause from a new friend that means she’s inviting me in, and the “own” sound that probably means dative case in Greek.
I’m learning. I’m becoming more sensitive.
Learning is the process by which I become sensitive to what I was once numb.
Greek could have been Latin or Bengali. But not anymore, because my eyes are seeing and my ears are hearing. I am learning, and it is not all Greek to me.
I growing more sensitive, because I am slowly finding hooks.
2. Learning Means You Found Hooks (Or Made Some)
The best teachers Whelp us grow mental hooks. The colors of the rainbow stuck because there was a hook named ROY G. BIV.
Try hanging your jacket on the wall without a hook. That’s pretty much me learning derivations for εἰμί. They slide right down the wall. I can read them 20 times and I still have to peek at my notecard for 21.
It is all Greek to me. They don’t stick. They don’t stick because there is no hook.
Not yet. But I’m still afloat in this sea of Greek.
Prior knowledge becomes hooks for new learning. Coats slide down the wall without hooks. I have sparse hooks for accusative, dative, and genitive endings. Substantival, predicate nominative and attributive were not prior categories of adjective for me.
But I’ve made some hooks. (But I’ll spare you, in case you don’t.)
Dr. Moore Knows
So far, six weeks in, Dr. Moore has only shown us what he wants us to know. Among verbs, he has only introduced us to the infinitive and the present active indicative.
Two months ago, mind you, I couldn’t recite the Greek alphabet much less recognize a Greek verb. One month ago I had the alphabet down and could spot verbs, but hadn’t a clue how to parse a word or diagram the simplest sentence. Diagramming they call “flow—as in river into rolling Greek ocean.
My stroke slows way down with parsing and flows. I doggy paddle on those.
But that’s not my point.
It’s not so much that I’m learning, or that learning is hard work, but that Dr. Moore decides what is taught and when. The instructor decides the sequence and pace. Dr. Moore decided I should study present active indicative verbs first, and learn first and second noun declensions next.
Dr. Moore knows Greek. He knows what I need to know and when. He knows that if I can memorize the 24 definite articles cold, it will make the inflected adjectives and pronouns easier.
Dr. Moore knows what I need to know, because he knows what’s ahead.
And if it’s true of Dr. Moore, with God how much more!
Still Swimming
Some think learning Greek is a waste of time. Others think using foreign words is “high-falutin.”
Both could be. The Lord knows the heart.
As for me, I’m still swimming. But I know God wants us to grow up and get out of the sea, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves” (Ephesians 4:14). I know that “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Ephesians 4:15).
We need not read, or speak, that truth in Greek.
But I am certain that one can grow in a sea of Greek.
“One might say that the knowledge of languages other than one’s natal tongue is what education in fact is, whether one aspires to be a plumber or a physicist, and that what is identified these days as “cultural appropriation” is what every man should earnestly be about. What is certain is that no one will grow his mind until he begins to take serious notes on the Great Dissertation, not all of which is in simple English.”
—S.M. Hutchen, “Language Notes”
What “language” have you been learning lately? Where are you becoming sensitive to something you were deaf or dull to before? I’d love to hear!
