Last 10 Posts from My Blog

Classics Kit — Lesson Creation

2026-02-16T06:36:00Z

Sometimes you have to remember that no one knows what you're working on unless you talk about it. Though with some unfortunate interruptions (such is life), Classics Kit development continues. And now...people are actually using it! Late last year I gave a preview of one feature of Classics Kit that I'm working on and it's called Linguamap. Now that I am teaching a class, I need Linguamap for my content more than ever. But because of the class, I had two more urgent problems to solve. First, I wanted a learning experience that supports not only basic content (text, image, and audio), but also more interactive exercises, like cloze sentence activities, various types of quiz activities, and others, all fused seamlessly together. Second, I wanted the creation experience to be simple, because otherwise I (and other creators) likely wouldn't take the time. So I built out this first version of the Lesson feature in Classics Kit to solve both problems.

Creating Lessons

I'll just start with a few examples today. In these gifs, you'll see the editor window on the left and a view on the right for what it would look like to the student.

Text with Audio

Students need text paired with audio so they can learn how the sounds of the language correspond to the script. This is especially important at first, but is good to reinforce for quite a long time. To pair up text and audio, all you have to do is write or paste in some text, trigger the record audio dialog, and start talking.

There's the option to re-record if you mess it up. I use that frequently, especially when recording longer chunks of text.

Markdown Formatting

It also supports basic Markdown formatting for headers, bold, blockquote, and so forth.

Image, Audio, and Text

Or how about easily being able to combine image, audio, and text? This is useful for introducing students to a word with optional L1 help.

In this case, I have to store more information than you'd have in typical markdown, so I store it in a code block. Here it is since the gif zooms past it.


```iat
{
  "image": "s3:lessons/1771211767400-1771211767260-farmer.png",
  "audio": "s3:recordings/1771211767260-farmer.mp3",
  "text": "αὐτουργός",
  "translation": "farmer"
}
```

This structured bit of information isn't supported in Markdown, so I store it as JSON in a code block. Perhaps this isn't easy at first to write, but that's okay. The tool does it. But after it's written, it's editable, so you can come in and change the text or the translation.

Student View

The student view looks very similar to the live preview version the editor uses. The only thing additional is they get some easy navigation over on the right. Each lesson can have multiple pages and within a lesson page there can be multiple sections, so the right navigation makes that navigable.

What Is Next?

There's more features to show but I will share more later. For the next few weeks I will keep working on this feature so I can provide the best experience for myself as I write and for my students, so it will continue to develop. This will include simple (but important) things like image attribution and complicated things like an integrated SRS (already in progress). Stay tuned. If anyone wants to discuss, wants a live demo, or whatever, I am easy to reach. Or, if you want to be kept up-to-date, sign up below.

Next week on the blog, I plan on sharing some of the technical details for the nerds in the audience.

Greek Class Starting Next Week

2026-02-03T07:50:00Z

Do you want to be able to read the New Testament in its original language? It was written in Greek. Do you want to read the first sci-fi novel? It was written in Greek by Lucian of Samosata. Do you want to read Plato? Do you want to read the Greek church fathers? Would you like greater knowledge of etymology so you can annoy your friends with trivia and have a slight advantage in Balderdash? If so, you should learn Greek!

On Sunday, February 8th, I'm starting a new Greek class. This is for complete beginners. We'll meet afternoons at FBC Parker in Parker, TX (just east of Plano). This class will be in-person.

Some things to know:

The class will last 12 weeks. There may be another class that starts right after, but the current commitment is 12 weeks.
We'll be discussing how to do Greek in self-study to prepare you for studying solo, should you choose to do so afterwards.
During the meeting, most of the time will be spent actively and in Greek, not English.
Homework will be primarily reading, not rote memorization.

If you are interested, contact me. I would love to chat about it.

The Trojan War

2026-02-02T06:10:00Z

Late last year I realized that I had missed the announcement of a new Greek novella, a little Greek book named Ὁ ἐπὶ Τροίᾱν Πόλεμος, or, The Trojan War. It's a retelling of the broader story of the Trojan war, beginning with the Judgement of Paris and extending beyond The Iliad. The book is a novella for Greek students early in their learning journey. The author, Seumas, has his own writeup here. Since I had recently finished reading Athenaze 1, I decided to give this a try.

What did I think? Foremost, I thought it was fun. The story of the Trojan War is an interesting one and this novella moves through it all at a good clip. Second, it makes the broader story approachable for early Greek readers. Third, we need more graded reading for Ancient Greek, and this adds an item to our list of resources. For this we can be thankful.

Who should read this? If you're past your elementary Greek learning, it's certainly a good book for you to read. Perhaps earlier since he calls it "Elementary-Mid." If you're somewhere in the long intermediate period of language learning, pick it up for some extensive reading. If you're interested in buying it, you can purchase it on the Storybase Books website.

Italian Athenaze

2026-01-09T06:25:00Z

A couple weeks ago I finished my first read through Italian Athenaze. What a trip.

What?

Italian Athenaze is not a book about learning Italian. It's a book for learning ancient Greek written in Italian. I don't know Italian, but I still got a lot out of this book. It's great practice and a good story.

Greek textbooks come in different flavors. Back in the day, the ones I started off with were very heavy on grammar and patterns but light on reading. And what reading they had tended to be collection of disconnected sentences chosen to fit whatever vocabulary and grammar had been covered, the real focus. When it comes to reading, this textbook is the opposite. In this book the narrative takes center stage. Though you'll notice the authors have lots of explanatory text about Greek (in Italian), you find a pages and pages of continuous narrative in Greek throughout. You'll see the same characters over time, see them relate, see them live their lives, and watch them encounter and attempt to overcome difficulties. And there's a lot of narrative. Chapter 1 has four pages of continuous Greek narrative. Chapter 8 has 22. Chapter 16 has 20 pages. I'm guessing there's well over 200 pages of continuous narrative. You'll see a whole lot of this:

If you want to take a look at it, you can find the entire book up on Archive.org. While you're at it, count the number of pages in the narrative and let me know.

I enjoyed it enough that I decided to order volume 2. Unfortunately, this book, like various others (e.g., I want a few of these) is more difficult to get here in the states. To get this second volume, I had to travel the Internet to Italian Amazon to purchase and have it shipped overseas. I'll get it soon-ish.

Should I Read It?

Yes. The real question is, when? If you don't know Italian, this is likely not a good choice for your first solo Greek textbook. If you look hard enough, you can find a PDF online that has English glosses for the Greek words at the bottom of the page, but you'll still be lacking any sort of discussion of Greek in your language, and you will likely need that.

If you've already got some basic knowledge, you can start using this book. Sure, you may have to look up a few or even many of the words (though less if you find that aforementioned PDF), but it would be worth it. This book gives you much more-or-less comprehensible graded ancient Greek input (depending on your level). I can't tell you exactly when you should be reading it, but this video by Luke Ranieri may help.

I think it could easily be used as a classroom textbook as the teacher can provide various helps and scaffolding to make the textbook usable for non-Italians. Consider finding a few friends that will read it with you. Or join a class. Or consider hiring a tutor to help you through it.

It is a fantastic textbook to use, even if you don't know Italian, and will give you many hours of useful input in just one reading.

Classics Kit — Linguamap

2025-11-21T12:15:00Z

I've been working on Classics Kit a lot recently and talking about it some, but it's time to start showing it off and getting some feedback. I plan on doing this regularly just so I can share more about the project. Consider all of these posts and videos as invitations to chat about the project. Each of these will just be a snapshot in time. What's working? Am I making any progress or is it all just vaporware?

This particular demo today is on a feature called Linguamap. This is a tool primarily for those who are curious about statistics about vocabulary and morphology usage across texts and exercises that might be used to teach a language. I also intend for this to be used for content creators. I'm going to use this myself for making exercises and writing graded reading stories. As you'll see, someone writing a graded reader could, at a glance, see how much new vocabulary they're throwing at their potential readers.

I would like to promote this kind of work. It benefits me as well as everyone else. As an example, I just heard the other day about this Medulla Project. (I have followed Carla's work for a while and own one of her books, but haven't actually ever met her.) Perhaps a later version Linguamap could help. If you create materials for Latin or Greek and think a tool like this could even potentially be useful for you, please reach out. Consider this an open invitation to chat. Linguamap will be more useful in collaboration with others. And it will be free.

When will others be able to use it? I'll be deploying it sometime in December. It won't take long to make it ready for someone else to test for Latin materials. Greek will take a little longer. As you can probably guess, Greek lemmatization is significantly more difficult than Latin. But it's in progress.

If you want to be kept up-to-date, you can watch for posts here or sign up for my newsletter.

Castle Panic: Unofficial Ancient Greek Edition

2025-11-11T17:38:00Z

Reading Greek is a lot of fun all by itself, but adding in some gaming can make it even better. A few years ago, I took a class with Seumas in which, instead of reading, we played an RPG in Latin. Here is his retrospective. That was a lot of fun! We need more of this. In my previous post I mentioned playing games at the Polis event. This post is about one of those. I now present to you Castle Panic: Unofficial Ancient Greek Edition.

Castle Panic is a multiplayer cooperative board game. Instead of fighting your teammates, you're working together to defeat the hordes of monsters coming to destroy your castle.

This particular game appealed to me because it's fun and because the necessary vocabulary is very constrained in scope. The vocabulary needed to play Castle Panic was limited to a few colors, words for the pieces in the game, and language needed to negotiate plans. "I want to kill that goblin with my swordsman." "Well, it seems to me that it would be better to attack the troll because the goblin will die when he attacks the wall," et cetera.

Running an RPG like D&D would be extremely difficult. The rules are quite complex, so a simpler system would be good. Seumas used Fate Condensed and that worked great. Along with the burden of rules, the DM would also need to paint quite a world in the second language, which could be daunting. With either an amazing vocabulary or enough preparation time, that's surely doable. But for Castle Panic, I didn't need a ton of time.

If you'd like to give it a shot, here's the vocabulary I came up with. First, words for soldiers and monsters.

Next, there's a number of items that I figured others might not know. Pitch and mortar, for example, usually won't be in the beginner books.

And finally, the order of play.

I think I played three or four rounds over a couple of days. The experiment was fun and well worth the investment!

My Polis Experience

2025-11-03T16:51:00Z

I thought I would share my Polis experience. Yes, it is several months later than the class. But better late than never. Hopefully, it will be useful to someone.

In June of this year, Polis put on three two-week immersive Greek and Latin courses at the University of Dallas. When I heard about it, I immediately talked to my wife and started making plans. I applied for (and took) the Advance Greek course that was to be taught by Christophe Rico. Other classes were to be taught by Luke Ranieri, Michael Sweet, and Erik Ellis.

Unfortunately, about three days before the class, Iran started sending missiles into Israel. We then started getting emails saying Christophe would be late. So things shifted around, and Luke taught my class for the first few days. When Christophe arrived, the teachers returned to their original classes.

Classes were to start on June 16th, but we all (except Christophe) met the night before. In this meeting, we all spoke in English to prepare for the classes. But that would be the last time for two weeks.

What was the average day like? For me, it started with driving. I live in Garland and drove to the school every day to attend class. But you probably don't care about this. Everyone first met at breakfast. Once you started the day, you spoke only in the language you were learning. If you were in the Latin course, you would be speaking Latin all day. If you were in one of the Greek courses, you'd be speaking Greek all day. So Greek started with breakfast or a little before. After that, we had classes in the morning, then lunch, then a break before getting together for the evening meal to eat together and practice our languages. After that, it was free time. Sometimes we played ping-pong in the dorm. Sometimes we played board games or card games. Sometimes we just hung out. Generally, unless you were talking to the cafeteria personnel at the school, it was easy to stay in the language all day long. There were no planned events on the weekends.

How was it? I thought it was fantastic. The opportunity to spend the entire day in immersive spoken ancient Greek was exhilarating. Could we ever speak in English? Sure, if clarification was needed, a little word here or there. But in general, Greek or Latin all day long.

And not only did I get to speak in and listen to Greek all day, I also got to meet some really great people. There are several classmates that I meet with weekly to converse in Greek, read, and practice. Also, surprisingly to me, almost no students were from my area. I expected more Dallas folks. Instead, we had people from all over the states, one from Australia, and one from Italy. The students in the local theological schools really missed out.

Would I Do It Again? Should You?

Gladly. I don't know what Polis will have next year, but I hope they will have something again. I'm saving up and carrying over two weeks of PTO so I can take any similar class, assuming it makes sense for me. Here's to hoping.

Should you take their in-person classes to learn Greek and Latin? Obviously, yes, I think so. I have taken a number of online courses conducted in spoken Latin or Greek, have met with groups online to do the same, or have done one-on-one tutoring. I continue to do these because they're very useful. But this immersive in-person type of event is a whole other experience. Having attended a few really great Latin-only multi-day online events, I can tell you that the energy is not the same. If you're stuck with virtual Latin and Greek, that's good. But if you can upgrade to in-person, it's better.

Unofficial Advice

And here is my unsolicited and certainly unofficial advice for someone who would consider attending.

First, if you want to take the beginner course, I recommend some preparation beforehand. Most of those in the beginner course had previous experience. It's very difficult for a teacher to provide the right material when the students are at very different levels. So I recommend that you don't go into this completely green. And if you want some advice on getting started, feel free to reach out.

Second, if you've done Greek for a little while, but you're not sure if you belong in the beginner or the advanced course, don't sweat it. There is a test you take that helps them put you in the right class. Also, after a few days, some people shuffled from the advanced class into the beginner class, and some from the beginner class into the advanced. The class you are in is not set in stone, and in my experience, they'll watch to make sure everyone's getting in the right place.

Third, stay in the dorm. If you were to come from out of town like most people, this might be your only choice. But even though I live in the Dallas area, I regret not staying in the dorm. I would've gotten more interaction and would've been able to focus more. Also, I annoyed my family when I came home because for days I refused to speak English to them. I could've avoided that as well. Regardless, staying in the dorm would be my recommendation.

Fourth, if you've had a lot of Ancient Greek but never experienced any spoken, It's not necessary, but I'd recommend some exposure before trying to join the advanced course. This is easy to do. There are a number of teachers who can meet with you to give you some basic spoken experience. Or, you can watch YouTube videos. You don't get the experience of trying to interact, but at least you'll get some auditory experience. If you want recommendations, reach out.

'Eπίλογος

What a great experience! Great instructors, new friends, and cafeteria food that was way better than I expected! And they did it right here on my doorstep. Blessed. So a big thank you to all my instructors and fellow students. You made the time a wonderful experience.

The Hypotheses of Stephen Krashen

2025-10-29T17:41:00Z

Stephen Krashen is an interesting figure. If you are not aware, he has a tremendous amount of material up on his website. It was from those materials that I made this.

Though I'm not sure that he is correct, I find his five hypotheses fascinating. If you don't know them, the obvious answer is to watch the video above, like, subscribe, share...all the things. If you would like something relatively short by Krashen to read, his 2004 paper presented at the English Teachers Association of the Republic of China would be a good start.

One of the problems of spending too much time reading is that it takes me away from coding on Classics Kit. And on that note, back to it.

More on Exercising Vocabulary

2025-10-25T13:40:00Z

I read the follow-up study to the paper I covered in What to do outside of language class?. Let's talk about it. It's called Retention of new words: Quantity of encounters, quality of task, and degree of knowledge. This follow-up adds a pure reading condition for comparison along with the Focus on Form and Focus on Forms conditions in the previous study. They also test more thoroughly. But the most important change is that they tested each type of learning activity with different occurrences of the test words. The paper is certainly worth checking out. Alternatively, you can watch my summary.

The biggest takeaway from both studies is that there is value in deliberately practicing vocabulary, and more practice leads to more improvement. I expect this will be no surprise to anyone, but it's good to validate these assumptions with an actual study.

But what are good ways to practice? This study used four methods:

Matching the target words with their definitions or synonyms
Supplying L2 translations for the L1 equivalents of the target words in isolation
Supplying L2 translations for the L1 equivalents of the target words in sentences
Filling in sentence blanks (the target words were provided in a word bank)

I'm skeptical of the value of the first activity, but perhaps there is research to support it. The second is a similar activity to using flashcards. Both of these first two are exercises that work entirely out of the context of any narrative or even any sentence. This doesn't mean that they're useless, but learning usage in a context is very valuable, so this limits their value. The last two exercises both seem similar to cloze exercises. I've added it to my list to find research on that particular type of practice.

Software could be used very effectively to create these kinds of exercises. Anki, for example, can do flashcards and cloze exercises quite well, assuming you know enough to make good exercises for yourself or can get them from someone else.

In class, however, there are much better activities. Don't replace non-communicative exercises with communicative ones.

Value the Background

In the last three posts I've focused on the method of and results of testing in three studies. Another good reason to read these, however, is to read the background portions of the papers. They are a gold mine of ideas, their evaluations, and resources to study. This, dear reader, is reason enough for you to take me up on my idea of reading the paper yourself. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

What To Do Outside of Language Class?

2025-10-15T19:08:00Z

I love taking classes with those in the living Latin and Greek community. The learning is much better when you use the language itself as the medium of discussion. If you get taught in the language, respond in the language, and everyone else around does as well, you get so much more exposure to vocabulary and the various forms in a more language-natural way. And on top of that, living Latin and Greek is just way more fun.

Though I'd like to spend many hours in conversation in and out of class each week, I'm limited by time and funds. Outside of class, when you have no one to talk to, what should you do? There are many answers, some good, some bad. I have some preferences in this regard...but are they good?

This is an area where SLA research can help. And it's for that reason that I read through Laufer and Rozovski-Roitblat's 2011 paper entitled "Incidental vocabulary acquisition: The effects of task type, word occurrence and their combination." In brief, the study is on the effectiveness of Focus on Form versus Focus on Forms for vocabulary acquisition. If you're interested in an overview of the paper or want to know what the difference between Focus on Form and Focus on Forms could possibly be, I created a video.

If you, dear reader, happen to have any recommendations for learning materials, I'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, I have things to study, so back to that.