Regroup, Reorganise and Review

We’ve regrouped!

We had a full class for Lesson 9 last Sunday. Trish was back from her marvellous (and highly successful) mission to Fiji, there weren’t any walk/runs for Colleen, and Larry and Joc were not baptising half a dozen young people. It was great having everyone altogether again.

As for L9, it has now been posted on the blog. In fact, all the reorganising of the Pages Tabs I mentioned before is now complete. I’ve grouped all the lessons so far into pairs and posted the pairs on individual pages. For example, Lesson One has been combined on the same page with Lesson Two to give Lesson 1 & 2. This gives us room to post five more lessons before we have to re-reorganise again.

I’ve also added the latest Why Learn Greek illustration—we’ve got 10 of them on there now. Schweet!

As for next class, everybody—including me—thought it was about time for another review. It’s been many months since the first one (way back before Lesson 4!) and we’ve covered a fair bit of ground since then; especially with regard to vocabulary. So, next Sunday is Number Two Review Day!


God bless,
Ἰακωβος

Quick Update

Okay, seat-belts on—this is gonna be fast…

Lesson 7 & 8 are now posted and I’ve started combining Lessons to save space (see L1 & 2 tab above this post). With our last vocabulary list, we’ve now touched on 1/3 of the words in the Greek New Testament! Yippee!!! Well done all.

Am still working on the homework for L8, so don’t worry, Trish, there’s still time for you to finish the L7 homework—that’s if you’re back from your Fiji mission, of course.

…done!


God bless,
Ἰακωβος

On Sons and Runs

My bit of a rest might have come to a close, but I’m still not able to devote all my time to preparing for Greek class. There’s been a development…

My son David flew into Auckland Airport two days ago to begin a two month visit to Godzone. He’s 17, lives in Glasgow, Scotland with his mum and brothers—and I haven’t seen him in over 6 years. Needless to say, this will distract me greatly. Let me apologise in advance: Sorry all, but again you’ll have to wait till late Saturday to get the next Lesson notes!

Last Sunday’s class went off without a hitch. Larry and Joc didn’t have any problems with the magic world of the Greek Present Indicative or the conjugation pattern of the –ω verbs. Even the movable nu made sense. So now everyone is set to tackle the slightly different –εω verbs and learn the paradigm form of 1st declension nouns.

Sandy also had time at the end of class to give a quick lesson on memorisation…but I can’t remember how that went.

Okay, I’ve added the latest Why Learn Greek and will get Lesson 7 up sometime today. Happy reading!

Oh, one more thing—I forgot to post Colleen’s latest championship time in the Mangawhai run/walk last Sunday. Despite freezing wind and driving rains she pulverised the 9km course in 1 hour, 11 minutes and 31 seconds. Outstanding! Well done, Colleen.


God bless,
Ἰακωβος

A Bit of a Rest

I’ve been enjoying a bit of a rest this week. Not only have I just finished the homework assignment for Lesson 7, but I haven’t even started preparing Lesson 8 yet. Not to worry, though, the reason I’m not rushing to get everything done is because in order to accommodate everyone’s real life events, Lesson 7 has been spread out over two weeks.

Last Sunday, Larry & Joc had to attend several baptisms at their church and were unable to make it to class, so Colleen, Raewyn and Trish had to take the plunge into verbs without them. This Sunday, the situation will be reversed; only Larry & Joc will be grappling with Lesson 7.

Colleen is going to be busy breezily slaughtering a field of 700-plus competitors in another Sport Northland Run/Walk. Be kind, Colleen, for they know not what they do.

As for Trish, she won’t be at class because she’s in Fiji on a 10-day mission with Marine Reach Ministries. She’s an optometrist and will be staring into dozens of eyeballs in many skulls of poor people living in small, rural villages. It’s a great service she’s doing and we all pray to the Lord that she blesses and is blessed mightily!

Raewyn didn’t have anything else on, but rather than sit through the lesson again, she decided to do some home-study that day. Thanks, Raewyn, for allowing us to mess with your schedule. We hope it won’t happen too often (I for one am shocked, SHOCKED, to discover people have lives outside of Greek Class! But, of course, we must forgive them, mustn't we…?)

Okay, I’ll be getting L7 posted soon, but will wait until Monday to put up the latest Why Learn Greek—don’t want to spoil the surprise for Larry & Joc.

Oh, one more thing—Sandy, my beautiful and lovely wife and assistant, has created a Paihia Baptist Church website and, naturally, she’s linked to this blog there. I’ll put a link up to the PBC site, too, but you can go there and have a look by clicking here if you can’t wait for me to finish my loafing arou bit-of-a-rest.

God bless,
Ἰακωβος

Flying Colours!

Well I’m about as chuffed as a teacher could be!

We had our first actual test on Sunday and everyone passed with flying colours. The test translations included many words not yet covered in class, but everyone rose to the challenge and put their newfound translation skills to the task—with excellent results.

Not that I was surprised; last week’s class exercise and all the homework assignments have painted a clear picture for me of a group of students entirely comfortable with the material.

Of course, I suspect one or two might’ve harboured a few private concerns. If so, well, this test proved those concerns unfounded!

Congratulations to all of you—Colleen, Joc, Larry, Raewyn and Trish—you translated like champions!


Okay, now that everyone’s an expert in the concept of noun and definite article declension, we’ll be changing gears for our next class—Lesson 7. We’re finally going to be looking at verbs. This means another foray into the dark and murky Land of Grammar. So bring your mining lamps and thinking caps...

Btw, I haven’t got the notes for L7 completed yet, so I’m not sure I’ll have them ready to post by Friday—if not, I’ll make sure you get them on Sunday at the start of class.

And speaking of posting, I’ve posted Lesson 6 now and added the latest Why Learn Greek to the WLG page.

God bless & congratulations again.

Ἰακωβος

Blog Update

I didn't get an email letting me know about the last blog post, so I assume you didn't either. Something wrong with Blogger's auto-alerts. I've posted this note to see if it'll activate the auto-alert. If you get this in an email, come to the blog and read the post below this...if you haven't already, of course.

God bless,
Ἰακωβος

Of Persons and Peoples

There wasn’t much left to Lesson 5 after we’d given everyone the masculine definite article at the end of L4; just a bit of explanation of a few of the different uses Greek has for the article. Most of this went without a hitch, but a small misunderstanding from last week’s homework was revisited when I used the sentence below as an example of how articles follow the number, gender and case of the nouns they describe:

ὁ ἀποστολος γραφει τοις λαοις τους νομους του Κυριου.

The apostle writes the laws of the Lord to the people.

Oh-oh! I’d used the dreaded “people” word!

The problem with λαος arose when everyone translated “τῳ λῳ” in last week’s homework as “to a person”, rather than “to a people”. When someone emailed asking why it wasn’t “person”, I made a fairly lengthy reply and, true to form, managed to muddy the already murky waters of confusion even more by saying, at one point, something along the lines of “in English the plural of people is peoples”. So, when I used the above sentence and translated the plural “τοις λαοις” as “to the people” rather than “to the peoples”, I was immediately called to account.

Now I’m going to try to clear the whole mess up. I’ve just investigated the matter thoroughly and have come up with the following:

I was wrong the second time!

Whenever a form of the plural λαοι is used, then the translation should be “peoples”. So the above translation should be “The apostle writes the laws of the Lord to the peoples.” And since that’s not what I intended to say, I should change the Greek—well done Trish for spotting that one and to Larry for goading me into checking. I stand corrected.

However, in the homework, the translation of “to a people” stands as the correct one against everyone’s “to a person”. And, just in case anyone’s tempted to argue that the general “to people” should be allowed, I’d just say that, well, if it’s singular...no, forget it, I’ll pick that one up another time.

Right.

Okay, back to business. In the last blog, I’d mentioned I’d be making a special announcement on Sunday. Well, I made it—we’re having our first test!

YIPPEE!!!

Okay, nobody actually said, “Yippee!” out loud, but I could tell everyone was stoked….no, really, I could…everyone…stoked…yes, they were…!


God bless,
Ἰακωβος

(P.s. The latest Why Learn Greek has also been added. jk)