Passing it on from emidala...

[darcydodo]

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Comments

JACT, how I loathe you.

[wageslave.livejournal.com]

I was originally "taught" Greek from JACT, but found it to be pretty much worthless. The text's philosophy -- presenting Greek in a way that gets you reading right off the bat without having to immediately memporize a whole bunch of verb and noun paradigms -- is something that I can get behind in theory (it's my experience that many students become frustrated with the slow progress of a non-intensive memorization-based system) this text doesn't really deliver a sensical alternative to the paradigm system. Among its major faults: the desire to treat every instance of irregularity in nouns as if it constituted its own declension (by the middle of the book you need to be able to remember at least ten variants of the first declension identified by a letter following the number -- 1a, 1b, etc.); the witholding of the genitive until the middle of the text, at which point they are presented "sub-declension" by "sub-declension" in a chart which spans two full pages; the with holding of the dative until the following chapter at which point the student is greeted with a similar chart; a table of contents which does not include the material covered in each chapter (If you want to review the uses of genitive absolute, you'd better remember if that was presented in "Unit 6" or "Unit 8" since this is as descriptive as the contents page ever gets). The only good thing about the book is its cover illustration -- an ancient woman (possibly Athena, I forget) looking quizzically at a wax tablet -- it seems that not even she can divine why the editors chose to organize their book so poorly.

Incidentally, Debra Hamel, author of the book listed above, taught the second half of that course. She hadn't been involved in selection of the text and spent the entire semester poking fun at it and bringing us photocopies from Mastronarde's text. (Also, she's a big Buffy fan.)

In the end I had to spend the following summer teaching myself Greek, first from the Groton text, and then again from H&Q.

Re: JACT, how I loathe you.

[darcydodo]

I agree that JACT is loathsome. I just thought its use was much more widely spread than it apparently actually is. But I really like Athenaze, and if we didn't have Mastronarde here, I'd toy with the idea of asking that we use it.