I'll be running two of my introductory Athenaze courses: 102 and 103, covering chs 9-16 and 17-24 respectively. I will run a new 101 course early in 2027.

I'll also be running two courses using the currently-being-written revision of my LGPSI project. Greek 182 will be my guinea pigs on chapters 11-20, while Greek 181 get the benefit of being second-round test subjects.

I have three intermediate/advanced Greek classes on offer: LXX Psalms, Greek Audio Adventures, and an extensive-reading group tackling Juan Coderch's translation of The Little Prince.

For Latin, I have a continuing course for Familia Romana, 104, and a reading group for the second half of Iter Subterraneum.

All course details can be found from the Courses page.

If you are interested in Old Irish, I'm still working out details with Dr. Felici about possible class arrangements.

An online Old Irish class

This is an invitation or call for interest: would you like to try learning Old Irish as a spoken/living language?

I had the opportunity to talk with Francesco this week, and asked him about his background, history with languages, what lead him to this work with Old Irish, and what projects might be coming down the pipeline (answer: several!)

I also floated the idea with him of running an online class in Old Irish using a communicative approach. As I have myself experienced, one of the best ways to road-test material is to put it into practice with students and see what works, and what doesn't.

He was open to the idea, and so I said I would see if I could garner interest. And hence this post. I realise my usual readership is more interested in Ancient Greek, some Latin, and broader linguistics, but if you'd consider an online class in Old Irish, let me know below:

The 'problem' such as it presents

The phrasing of the problem, especially in the form that Hurt presented it, is the "why classical languages when indigenous languages all around us are dying?" That question immediately conflates two questions or issues which I believe we should hold as distinct before we put them in relation.

The first of these is "why learn a classical language?" Every teacher of classical Greek and/or Latin in a classroom setting has to face this question because they must face reality of convincing students, parents, and school administrations of the value of doing so. Most of the traditional reasons given so are problematic: teaching you to think critically, improving your English, making you better at 'grammar', equipping you for science or law, etc. etc.. Either the claim is specious at best, or it applies equally well to any other language in its place. Still, a case must be made positively for why, and individual reasons may vary. For my part, the simplest and broadest reason to learn a language is that it provides entry to a language's culture-of-communication. In the case of Latin, you are provided entry to the ongoing predominantly literary conversation of over 2000 years. If that's a communicative-culture you want entry to, to read its literary products of any sort, then learn Latin.

The second question is completely different, "should you care about minority language death?" And even there, there is a bundle of issues bound up in it. I think that Hurt is right in that language diversity is feature not bug, though the history of thinking "if only we all spoke the same language" persists in more enlightened (please let us all learn Esperanto) and more vicious (monoculturalist racism and linguistic prejudice) forms. It is, to my mind, a great tragedy and a moral one at that, to witness the death of indigenous languages in Australia, most of which are in tremendous peril and whose deaths can be placed directly at the feet of Australian's colonial legacy (and present).

And yet what is the connection between these two? Is it of the order "How can you say you love chickens while eating KFC?" or more of the non-sequitur of "Do you care about the destruction of the rainforest and yet you are playing basketball?"

The other problem

There is a second problem that Hurt attempted to address in her paper. The demands of the Australian Curriculum, particularly in its latest versions, imposes a requirement that virtually all subjects seek to make relevant connections to Australian Aboriginal culture, history, and content. It has been very difficult for classical languages to do so. In Latin, there are scarcely any pieces of Latin content that directly engage Australia, let alone indigenous issues. Teachers in schools in Australia have this demand imposed from on-high, and have to find a way to respond to it.

This isn't a problem I can fix for teachers in school settings. Instead I want to suggest that it's misguided and wrong.

When we talk about learning a language we are also inevitably talking about learning a culture, because language and culture are intertwined. And in becoming a user of a language, every learner co-constructs a new social identity in that language. Whether we conceive of this as an additional added identity, or the emergence of a multiplex identity, or whatever, and the sociological and psychological dimensions of this idea are not to be underestimated, to become a speaker is to become some kind of person in that language's speaking-community.

Doing so is an act of cross-cultural communication and translation, because you bring with you points of contact from your already-acquired languages and their speaker-community cultures: who you are. And you are entering into a new speaker-community. For those students who are indigenous Australians, that cross-cultural connection and negotiation already involves the kind of 'content' and 'contact' the curriculum is asking for. For those students who aren't, to insert it there is an act of tokenism and a bizarre intrusion.

Although Latin has had a continuous active spoken tradition, it does not have a living community with native-speaker transmission. Moreso, ancient Greek does not have a living speaker-community with parent-child transmission. That means there are specific issues about 'becoming' a speaker that do not apply in other contexts. Learners are co-constructing their speaker-identity in a community where (99.99%) of other speakers are also L2 speakers. This point will become important as I will return to it later.

Fixed pies

I return now to the question that I raised in part one, of what kind of connection there is between minority language death and classical languages. The contention often is if you are putting time into 'dead' languages, you are taking resources away from living ones.

Hurt addressed this in part by discussing the 'fixed pie mentality'. I.e, there's only so much pie, and so pie for Latin and Greek means less pie for other languages. Aboriginal languages are, for the most part, starving.

Furthermore, Hurt contests that this is a fallacy, or at least we should adopt a less fixed mindset. E.g., someone who learns one L2, often gets the taste for languages and linguistics, and can go on and will often go on to learn other languages. Learning/Teaching/Promoting Latin and ancient Greek doesn't have to be a zero-sum game and we shouldn't think of it that way.

I want to affirm partial agreement and resounding sympathy for this position. Yet, at the end of the day we also have to reckon with various forms of scarcity and competition. Funding resources are a fixed pie, as school-based teachers well know.

More importantly, languages compete for speakers/users and for the time and domains they utilise a language in. To truly see competent users of Latin and Greek means those learners are not 'available' or at least 'not as available' to be learners or speakers of Aboriginal languages, or other minority language users. That is a stark reality.

Yet, a far more important question is this how many of these potential students are actually potential students of Australian Aboriginal languages and contributors to language revitalisation efforts?

Language, culture, identity, and revitalisation

I am fortunately blessed in my life to have learn two minority languages with living speaker continuity: Mongolian and Scottish Gaelic. I learnt the former by living in Mongolia and learning in situ, and co-creating a social identity as a foreigner there accepted and welcomed as a teacher within a sub-community; I learnt the latter through long, ongoing study via distance, and I have a distinct social identity as a Gael and Gaelic-user. Through my studies of Gaelic, I have also pursued higher education through the medium of Gaelic, including issues related to post-colonialism, minority language politics and policy, language revitalisation, and so on. These inform my perspective on the following.

Who gets to determine who gets to learn a language? With Latin and ancient Greek I do not believe there are or should be any meaningful gatekeepers, but it is more complicated with indigenous languages. I don't presume that any and all comers are entitled to learn an indigenous language and 'make it their own'. There are questions of cultural ownership, legitimacy, and identity bound up in Australian Aboriginal languages that should not be ignored.

Furthermore, language revitalisation, or even revival, is bloody hard. Read accounts of language revitalisation efforts and you'll soon see how hard it is. I don't think we should at all underestimate this, because genuine language revitalisation requires some hardy language activists to go pretty all-in in their efforts, and take a community along with them for the journey.

So we are kidding ourselves if we think that we can somehow address this in a meaningful way by either 'helping' divert some resources from classical language teaching, or inspiring learners to go on and learn yet another language, or providing a tokenistic appropriation of indigenous cultural identity and artefacts within the classical languages curriculum.

To return to my question at the end of part one, whether you play basketball has little to no effect on deforestation of the world's rainforests. But you should care about the latter regardless. I propose that this might work itself out in three primary ways for teachers of historical languages.

Firstly, there are important histories of imperialism, culturalism, language shift and language death woven through the classical and not-so-classical histories of Latin, ancient Greek, and other major historical languages. These are points of cross-cultural contact, to discuss with students what linguistic imperialism looks like, why languages die and how they are killed, and what resistance to this might look like. It can be done in your target language and using your target language texts. Romans had plenty of things to say about doing their version of anthropology.

Secondly, you can actively draw some teaching methodologies from language revitalisation workers, including the famous WAYK. In doing so, you can draw student attention to these endeavours. You might also, nobly, seek to fund some of these efforts out of the goodness of your hearts.

Thirdly, you can raise issues around language, identity, culture, revitalisation, and world languages more broadly, and discuss with students how those issues intersect with their languages, both L1s, heritage languages, other L2s, and the language you teach. That can be, and should be, a bridge to making them aware of these and related issues pertaining to the Aboriginal Australian languages.

Hurt finished her presentation by arguing that a proper 'liberal humanities' underpinning to classical language education, that is critical thinking, engagement with texts, pursuit of justice, and so on forms the kind of people that are also committed to the foundations of Reconciliation (as understood in the Australian context), and that this ultimately is the 'point of connection'. I share Hurt's commitment to that kind of liberal humanities education, and virtue formation, and how it undergirds minority language revitalisation.

And so I have little interest in appeasing the Australian Curriculum's tokenistic efforts to make sure every subject has some bit of Australian Aboriginal cultural and historical connection. I think it's a pedagogical sham. We can do better than that, by engaging the substance of these questions and pursuing a fuller vision of Reconciliation in our society, including reparations, and a part of that may be supporting and enabling genuine efforts towards language revitalisation.

This year's theme was "textbooks", and although I missed the first session, there were a lot of papers that only tangentially touched that theme anyway. But it got me thinking, which is always good.  I have a lot of opinions on textbooks, and I also own a lot of them. But before I spout of opinions on textbooks, it behoves us to take a step back and ask what is a textbook for?

 Language textbooks have a long and complicated history. Whether it’s the colloquia of the middle ages, of 15th century primers, there has long been an interest in compiling teaching materials into a more enduring, and transmissible form. For this post, I want to look at this through a few lenses. So, textbook as repository of declarative knowledge, textbook as teacher stand-in, textbook as input delivery system, textbook as toolbox, textbook as map.

Repository of declarative knowledge

I think the first way we tend to look at textbooks is that they are the things we store the knowledge in. Here's a book of knowledge, and it's going to tell you the stuff you are supposed to know, and you will take that knowledge out of the book, off the page, and into your head. This particularly reflects a world in which books were our data storage. Where else would you store information? A book is a convenient way of writing down all the things.

It's still very much the way we often think about textbooks. That the book has all the information, in an authoritative way, and you go to the book to get the knowledge.

Teacher stand-in

But there are other ways to think about textbooks, especially language textbooks. One of those is that a textbook stands in for a teacher. If language education is about some kind of transfer or led-experience, then a textbook does what a teacher cannot. For example when there is no teacher. Or when a teacher is not up to the task. Or when there is one teacher and many learners. In these and many more situations, the textbook is written in a way, or sometimes just used in such a way, that it mimics what a teacher would do. The textbook in this way of imagining it is the teaching agent.

Input delivery system

A different type of textbook is one where the textbook itself is giving lots of in-language content. This kind of textbook contains within itself lots of material that the learner is to read (or hear) as a means of learning the language. This can work in concert with the two previous ideas of the textbook, or stand alone. But the main feature of a textbook like this is quantity of target-language material for the learner to engage with.

Textbook as map

Another way we might think of a textbook is as a map. That is, it shows us the terrain of a subject, and where we might go and how we might get there. In language, that might be the explanatory presentation of grammar, which is a map of how the language is used. But it might also function as a map in other ways, charting a course of learning as a journey.

Textbook as toolbox

In a different vein, we might conceive of the textbook as a toolbox. Not as a rigid set of exercises, but as a varied set of deployable tools that do different jobs, solve different problems, and in language learning, move us along in various and complementary ways. A textbook like this offers variety and flexibility in solving problems.

Where to?

One of the things that I think considering textbooks under different conceptual models allows us to do, is to reconsider precisely (a) how we use textbooks that already exist, but also (b) what a textbook could be. And maybe there are other ways that we can think about textbooks! Would love to hear from you - are there other ways you think about (language) textbooks? Do you have a favourite textbook, for whatever reason? Things you love or loathe?

Lately, however, I was thinking a little more about it, in conjunction with my ongoing reading of Felici's thesis. Old Irish has 66 phonemes. That's quite a lot. Scottish Gaelic does have 67 though, English around 44, I would put Ancient Greek at 25 consonants, 13 vowels, and a problematic number of diphthongs.

Of course, this depends upon your period and analysis of Greek pronunciation. Anyway, on the Old Irish side of the equation, this is one of the challenges for learners of Old Irish (including me): you need to learn a range of phonemes many of which are not distinguished or produced in your native language (L1), and you have not much in the way of audio. As I think about Felici's proposal for OI living language materials, it seems clear that extensive and high-quality audio is essential.

But lately I have been thinking a lot more about Ancient Greek as well. One of the problem learners face is typically φ/π/β and the parallel sets of χ/κ/γ and θ/τ/δ. It is much easier for most L1 English speakers to use fricatives, and then ignore aspiration on π,κ,τ, but if you want to adopt an attic restored pronunciation, then it's not that φ,χ,θ are difficult, it's that learning to de-aspirate π,κ,τ is difficult, especially in word-initial positions, and also to make sure that they remain distinct from β,γ,δ.

In the second half of 2025 as part of my Gaelic degree, we did a relatively (semi-technical but not all the way) deep dive into (Scottish) Gaelic phonology. This was done through the medium of Gaelic by the way. It was very helpful, partly because it also illuminated to me some features of Gaelic orthography.

Of course, learning how to produce particular sounds is not quite the same as learning to perceive particular sounds, and this has bearing on any L2, including Ancient Greek. So I got to wondering what sort of research and interventions exist for this.

I should have known better. There is a considerable amount of SLA work on these issues. From my relatively recent foray into that literature there are (naturally) competing theories about how these (perception and production in particular) relate, especially when learning an L2. This includes James Flege's Speech Learning Model, which if I understand it correctly posits that because an L2-learner doesn't come as a blank slate to an L2's phonemic system, how they distinguish L2 sounds depends in part upon distance/nearness to the phonemic categories in their L1. Learners need to develop new perceptual categories in order to also produce distinct sounds. Flege and Bohn's revised model argues that the interaction of L1 and L2 categories over time allows adults to form new phonetic categories.

Catherine Best's Perceptual Assimilation Model helps us because how an L2's sounds map to a learner's already existing categories, determines how difficult it is going to be to learn contrasts in the L2 sound system. E.g., because /p/ and /pʰ/ are perceived as /p/, it is going to remain hard for an English speaker to hear and/or produce them as distinct.

I don't have any experience in what I'm about to propose, but if you do I'd love to hear from you. One way to tackle this might be to apply High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT). HVPT primarily tackles perception, not production, but it's built on the idea that exposure to multiple speakers producing 'the same' sound helps to train the learner to perceive the relevant distinctions. Because the multiple speakers have a natural degree of variation, the listener learns to focus on what is common, which is the contrasting sound they need to distinguish. There are some meta-analyses of HVPT which supports its efficacy for perception, and some research to suggest it might improve production as well (especially if you throw in some explicit articulatory training).

The problem for ancient Greek remains. You would need a number of speakers to record audio, each committed to realising the same pronunciation scheme, each with a pretty good ability to produce those distinctions, and then you'd need to organise that amount of sound into a discrete learning intervention. I don't think I have the time or energy to do that.

Which might be disappointing to hear, but perhaps it's a task someone will take up in the future. In the meantime, a little bit of attention to understanding the phonology of the language, learning to produce different sounds, and listening to whatever good audio recordings you can find, is probably the package of things I'd recommend you do.

You might be aware there are some guidelines on how many guided hours one needs to reach certain CEFR proficiency levels. For English it runs something like: A1 - 100, A2 - 200, B1 - 400, B2 - 600, C1 - 800, C2 - 1000-1200. (You might be aware of the FSI hours guide, which has never seen much verification, but it puts the hours for truly difficult languages up to around 2,200 for category 4, which is where I suspect Old Irish would end up.).

Guided hours means under immediate guidance or supervision from an instructor. So this hour count doesn't include independent study hours which are more difficult to judge. Those hours also vary slightly based on language.

There's another article I often come back to on this topic, which is Geortler, Kraemer, Schenker, 'Setting Evidence-Based Language Goals', Foreign Language Annals Vol 49, Is 3, pp 434-454, 2016. They were looking at setting benchmarks and outcomes for the German program at MSU, but their research both looks at some of this data, and puts it into the context of a university language program.

I was intrigued, reading Felici's thesis, by the comments on p134, of AVN allocating 150 contact hours for Familia Romana, and Polis Institute 120 hours to their first book. If you've seen Polis Book 1, you'll know it doesn't cover that much grammar, and there are 2 follow-on volumes. Familia Romana does cover a lot, grammar wise, and a lot of text.

By contrast, I cover all of 2-volumes of Athenaze in 60 contact hours, and all of Familia Romana in 40 hours. Neither feels truly sufficient, and I am aware both that (i) I'm relying on students putting in a significant amount of independent work to make the most of class time, (ii) the level of oral proficiency that I can expect from students after that introductory sequence ought to be relatively low.

I am not entirely sure what alternative there is in this kind of context though. Nobody except full-time students can really dedicate the time required to get a lot of contact hours, and thus exposure to living language, to develop oral proficiency to a decent level in a shorter amount of time. There are limits to what time people can devote to a language, short of making it a priority. And whether one does or not, it all requires not only time, but money.

Felici discusses his own experience with a traditional sequence of Old Irish - 100 contact hours of 4 semesters, barely enough to cover the grammar and morphosyntax itself. I think Ancient Greek begins to look easy by comparison, and Latin even more so. But none of this obviates the need for time spent in the language.

150 or 120 hours with Familia Romana or Polis book 1 is still, by the way, only really enough to probably get you to A1 or a bit beyond on the CEFR scale. If you do 120 hours as an intensive, that's 6hrs/day, 5d/week, 4-weeks. If you start to multiply that by the proficiency levels, we are talking months of full-time language study to get to the higher levels. Alternatively, at 2 hours a week, 48 weeks a year, you could get to 1000 hours in 10.4 years.

I think this kind of calculation is useful, but not that useful. Because we mostly aren't doing this kind of thing to this extent. And although 'C2 Ancient Greek' is one of my personal goals, you don't have to get to superior mastery of a language to read and enjoy Ancient Greek literature broadly. Honestly, getting students to B1 and maybe B2 will serve most people's needs. It's still just a lot of hours.

As I reflect on different materials I am developing and my own practice as a language learner and what might be possible as a facilitator of others' language learning, I think part of this must be finding ways to help learners' independent hours be better bang-for-buck. So, as an instructor I want to ask myself, "what is best practice for facilitating language acquisition during live instructor-led hours?" but as a guide and resource creator for others, "what is best practice for language learners to do on their own outside and apart from instructor-led hours?"

1. How many 'words' do you need to 'know' to reach certain proficiency milestones in Ancient Greek?
2. How many exposures to a word do you need to (a) passively recognise a word, (b) actively recall a word?
3. How many words do you need to read to reach those exposure-points for certain milestones?

If you're familiar with this kind of work, you'll know that it rests solidly on the extensive research of Paul Nation in this area. That's where I'm starting from, and I'm thinking about how this applies both broadly and narrowly, in terms of grading reading programs, and total words vs words known.

Whenever I have a question like this, I always figure that the best person to ask is James Tauber, because if he doesn't know the answer, either he knows who does, or how to calculate it, or most often "I was working on this X years ago, here's an old post about it."

Which is exactly the case here, in fact he and I discussed this 7 years' ago. The numbers differ across different corpora, but if I summarise some of the findings from that earlier work:

For the New Testament, you cross 95% at 2000 lemmas, 98% around 3000.

For all of Perseus / OGL in 2019, it's 95% at somewhere between 4-5000 lemmas, 98% at 8000 lemmas.

There's a very, very long tail in Greek literature, which means that you never stop meeting new words, The fact that it's 8k lemmas at 98.00% but then 20k at 99.75% tells you how you'll never quite get there! (

Nation does has a an attempt to correlate CEFR levels and Vocabulary sizes, which you can access on this page. There he also cites some research. Just looking at Nation's suggested vocabulary sizes, and noting that he is estimating on the high side compared to others, I think that is probably reasonably comparable to Ancient Greek. Whatever morphological savings you get from a richly inflected language, seem to be somewhat cancelled out by the breadth of Ancient Greek words.

To replicate Nation's table in brief:

A1 - 120 survival words

A2 - Most frequent 1000 word families

B1 - 2-3000k

B2 - 4k

C1 - 5-6k

C2 - 7-9k

But what do you need to learn that many words? Nation's 2014 article, 'How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words?' attempts to answer this.

Using 'buckets' of 1000 words, and corpus data, with the assumption that you need at least 12 repetitions, Nation calculates:

2k words: 171,411.

3k words: 300,219

4k words: 534, 697

5k words: 1,061,382.

6k words: 21,450,068.

7k words: 2,035,809.

8k words: 2,427,807.

9k words: 2,956,908.

So, if you want to get to the point of reading almost all of Greek literature with 98% vocabulary comprehension, you need to also probably read around 3 million words of Ancient Greek. But even to get to 4-5k lemmas, where you would have 95% coverage, you need 500k-1 million words of reading.

Here is the question I keep asking myself as a result of all this: how to provide scaffolded and graded reading to help students read the first 100k, 200k, 300k to build their vocabulary from zero to 'I can read authentic ancient texts without much help'?

More on this in later posts.

The thesis itself is fascinating because it documents the author's attempts to teach Old Irish via Communicative Methods (no one still has a good name for this, I think I have mostly settled on 'communicative' or 'communicative language teaching' CLT). But, because there is zero history of doing so, the entire chapter one of the dissertation is a survey of CLT approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek from the renaissance to the present.

That's why if you're a reader of this site, you should probably go and read chapter 1 of Felici's dissertation. Even though I knew lots of these texts, authors, practitioners, and methods, I have never seen such a systematic and thorough treatment of it all. He covers colloquia, Ollendorf, Adler, Kendrick, Rouse and his contemporaryies, Ørberg, the recent work of Cultura Clásica and Vivarium Novum, Polis, and a range of modern texts in Greek and Latin right up until the last couple of years. The dissertation was submitted in 2025, so that's about as recent as you can hope to find.

Felici clearly knows his stuff here, and I'm very grateful to see it pulled together in one place. In particular, there's lots of details and insights here that come from 'the European scene', that I have never really had access to. The bibliography is extensive, and a great starting point to go from his chapter to the broader work. I have written myself a bunch of notes of things to investigate further.

Personally, I had heard a little bit about Felici before, as I have a passing but never-got-anywhere interest in Old Irish. This is in part because all the standard textbooks are grim, foreboding traditionalist grammars and I don't have the patience for them anymore. Felici talks about his own work in trying to create a conversational-based textbook, but I am unaware that he has published anything along those lines beyond his Auraicept na nÉicsíne: A first reading book in Old Irish.

To read further in his thesis is to commiserate with the challenges. Every week I face those challenges in trying to teach Ancient Greek better, and write better resources. I think Latin has led the game, Ancient Greek is following slowly, like a tired runner looking forlornly at those far ahead, and Old Irish is just starting this race.

Felici's dissertation is open-access, so go and read chapter one for yourself!

p.s. Since originally writing this, I have been in contact with Dr. Felici himself, and am looking forward to some fruitful collaboration possibilities.

Full disclosure, this is occasioned by hearing from a student or two, and a faculty member, trying to implement communicative teaching and having some struggles; but this is not me trying to solve their problems, just thinking through this type of problem more broadly.

Here is my starting point for thinking about this: "comprehensible input works". That is to say, it's well-established in SLA that the thing that drives language acquisition is exposure to input that is meaningful and comprehensible. Not much else seems to drive acquisition of a language. Despite our strong intuitions otherwise, that you need explicit grammar or whatever, 'teaching grammar' does not appear to lead to language acquisition. So, unless the field of SLA does a total 180-degree turn, this remains axiomatic in the considering how we acquire languages.

However, lots and lots of things can 'go wrong'. It is not the case that you can just throw students extensive reading or extensive listening or just talk to them all day in Latin or Ancient Greek, and assume that they'll succeed. CI isn't magic, and it's almost certainly the case that at some point in either our teaching our or learning that we'll hit not a plateau, but a steep incline.

What happens when you come across an incline? You slow down, because the challenge is steep, or possibly insurmountable. Now, to step out of my metaphor, what happens when the texts, visual or audio, are too difficult? It means you have to troubleshoot.

This is, however, the point at which we tend to fall back to Grammar-Translation. Why? For a few reasons, I suspect.

1. As teachers, we often have a very good explicit and external grasp of the grammar, and so we can explain how the pieces of the language fit together, ad so how texts mean. We can render thinks comprehensible, and we were probably trained pretty well in doing so.
2. As learners, we want to understand a text, and we want to understand it explicitly if we can't understand it implicitly, and so we also want to 'know the grammar', so that we can figure out texts. If the explicit grammar is hidden from us, we feel like we've been cheated of the tools. It's like we're playing a game and the teacher has modding tools and won't let us use them.
3. We feel more of a sense of mastery of a language when we know and understand explicit grammar.
4. We still tend to think that grammar will lead to acquisition.

And so, whether on the teacher or the learner side, resorting to grammar-translation seems like a fall-back position for when things get tough.

The right question to ask in this situation is if X isn't working, should I persevere with X, or try Y? So it is right to ask this. If a 'communicative approach' does not seem to be delivering the results it promised, then what needs to change? I think the problem with our answer in this situation is that it looks like this: "Well, I guess we'll go back to grammar-translation then; at least we know that works."

It doesn't work. Or, this is most important it doesn't work the way we think it does and it doesn't achieve what we want it to.

Why yes to grammar, sometimes

But before I talk about what I think one ought to do, let me make a positive case for how I think you absolutely can and should use grammar + translation and why you should teach explicit grammar.

I don't have an anti-grammar stance per se. I think, especially for anyone studying historical languages, there is real value and worth in learning explicit grammar. The important thing is to realise what is does and does not do for you.

Learning grammar and practising translation does not, as a practice, increase language acquisition.

Understanding the grammar of a language is understanding how a language works, or in other words how it makes meanings.

So, let's take a slightly different tack for a moment. What happens when you come to a sentence or text in a language that you cannot read and process and understand 'naturally'? Then it's incomprehensibly input. And it stops you.

There are only so many options. One, give up and move on. Two, get some aids to help you. Three, apply grammar and translate.

Option 2 might involve having another person paraphrase it, provide scaffolding, have a conversation in which they explain certain things, use target-language or monolingual glossing, etc. etc..

Option 3 means you have the tools to say, "okay, I don't know what this means, but I do know (a) the structures of the language and how they make meaning, and (b) I can look up vocabulary I don't know, so (c) I can translate this sentence or text into my own language and that's one way of making it comprehensible.

The next mistake comes, though, in thinking that this counts as 'reading'. Or that it is a viable way to acquire language. It's not reading, it's translating in order to understand. It might enable reading, but it's not reading. Nor is it really a viable way to acquire language. Unless you use that translation to go back and actually read and process the text again. But it's very slow to do this.

Translating into your own language in order to understand gives you the illusion that you're reading and understanding a foreign language, and precisely for that reason you should be wary of using it as a primary strategy. It means the things you are reading are not comprehensible input for you. It also can fool you into thinking that you can read far harder things than you probably should, and can reinforce the idea that if you just study grammar and vocab, you will be able to speed-translate your way to proficiency.

So, then, why teach grammar and translation at all? Because it gives you the tools that precisely when you do run into a roadblock, you can solve it. You can render it comprehensible for yourself.

To return to my initial question/prompt then: grammar+translation is a fall-back when you don't have other options for rendering a text comprehensible, and it's really good at that. It's also really good if you want to talk and discuss and analyse how texts mean.

But it's not a good fall-back in general course design for acquiring a language, because it is trying to solve the wrong problem the wrong way. The problem isn't really "these texts are too hard without learning grammar", it's just "these texts are too hard for where a learner currently is, so they aren't providing comprehensible input".

The solution to that problem is, hopefully, becoming more obvious. It's more comprehensible input. Arrgh, but that was the problem we began with - CI didn't seem to be 'working'. I suspect that most of the time when it's not 'working', it's because it's not (a) enough (b) actual CI. That is, trying to read or listen to a lot of content that is too difficult for you doesn't do you much good. You need better, more appropriate, content. There is also the 'enough' problem. I think in historical languages we generally vastly underestimate the amount of easier content people need to get anywhere acquisition-wise, and we confidently overestimate, or oversell, the ability to get pretty far in the language with not-very-much time.

If what you're trying to read isn't making sense, the problem is that it isn't making sense. If you have to make sense of it, grammar + translation will do that for you, but if you don't have to, then reading something else that's appropriate, and lots of it, is what's going to serve acquisition in the long run.

As I wrote very briefly last week, I've moved thepatrologist over to a new site. In this post I want to talk about where we've come from, then very briefly about why the move, and then about where to find things that have gone missing, and what things might look like moving forward.

The Past

I first started The Patrologist as a website in 2014. By that stage I had been blogging for around 8-9 years, and I had maintained another blogspot blog up until that point, but I decided it was time to create a space that was less personal, slightly more professional. Or, at the least, focused on my academic interests around classics, ancient history, theology, patristics, and ancient Greek and Latin.

And so in the early days I wrote more about patristics as I completed my PhD in that area. Over time I came to write more and more about second language acquisition, especially as I myself moved into the space of teaching ancient Greek and Latin via communicative methods (and moved more and more out of Academia, which never wanted me anyway).

These days I spend most of my working hours in teaching Latin and ancient Greek as living languages, and this continues to be one of my primary interests, and for very many of you the primary reason you read this blog! I still read and think about a range of associated topics, which is why there'll always be a space here to for occasional writings on classics, ancient history, theology, and patristics. I also am trying to spend more time on the resources and infrastructure that support learning historical languages as living ones.

The Move

Wordpress served me pretty well over the years, but in recent ones I had more and more issues behind the scenes, and although I'm sure there probably were ways to wipe the slate and build a whole new site that did everything I wanted, it was easier for me in many other ways to simply move somewhere new. So, here we are.

What's here at the moment are all the old posts. If you're looking for something from the back catalogue, it's there. Some links are almost certainly broken though, so if you find one, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

What's mostly missing at the moment are some of the support pages, and most importantly the store. That's alright because it's another few months before another round of classes begins, and I should have that sorted by then.

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What's to come

I have in the past written to a schedule, and I plan to return to that. For long periods I have mostly written here when I've had something worth saying, but the discipline of writing on these topics is good for me.

Look forward to more Greek and Latin resources in particular. Upcoming courses and merch.

Lastly, I have some more projects in the pipeline which I'll speak about in a few months' time.

Until then, thanks for reading.