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223 points benkaiser | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.518s | source
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gwd ◴[] No.42544767[source]
I'm learning New Testament Greek on my own*, and sometimes I paste a snippet in to Claude Sonnet and ask questions about the language (or occasionally the interpretation); I usually say it's from the New Testament but don't bother with the reference. Probably around half the time, the opening line of the response is, "This verse is <reference>, and...". The reference is almost always accurate.

* Using a system I developed myself; currently in open development: https://www.laleolanguage.com

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1. nickpsecurity ◴[] No.42544925[source]
In case it helps, Bill Mounce has one or two classes on Biblical Greek via his free seminary:

https://www.biblicaltraining.org/learn/institute/nt201-bibli...

(Note: They actually host free classes from instructors at over a dozen seminaries. Mounce himself is a top expert in Greek.)

For anyone learning Biblical Hebrew, I found Master's Seminary has some courses on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvh8yziVsCE&list=PL9392DD285...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joDB5azc_CM&list=PL4DC84F8EB...

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2. ARandomerDude ◴[] No.42545864[source]
Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek and the workbook were good enough that I stopped watching the lectures. The workbook is excellent. Can't recommend it enough.
3. gwd ◴[] No.42548145[source]
So the theory behind Guided Immersion is that you shouldn't need most of that. When Priscilla and Aquilla were learning Greek, nobody sat them down and said, "Now definite articles are inflected according to gender, number, and case: ho, hoi, ..." They were just given example after example, and the language processing unit of their brains figured it out.

So Guided Immersion tries to just give you not only vocab, but grammar in such a way that there's always only a handful of concepts you haven't mastered.

I developed Guided Immersion to help myself master Mandarin, actually; I used Anki with Mandarin for probably 8 years before developing Guided Immersion; once I switched I never went back. Then about a year and a half ago ago I ported it over to Koine Greek not knowing any Greek, and started using it myself after watching a handful of YouTube Videos introducing the characters and the basic cases.

Maybe it's just the way my brain works, but I can't imagine sitting down and trying to memorize all those endings, particularly for the verbs.

I have now bought Mounce's "Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar", and "The Morphology of Biblical Greek", to help me refine the "language schema" the algorithm uses. I appreciate the work Mounce has done to find the deeper morphological rules which make sense of what look like "irregular" inflections; teaching the algorithm about those will certainly help it to present things in a more useful way to learners. But I don't think trying to grind through all that in your conscious mind is the way to go.