Seumas Macdonald's Blog (5)

I have written and posted a Manifesto on the Classical Languages

Today I started a small tutorial group of students on Conversational Greek. About 12 people showed up, entirely voluntarily, so that was a good start. All have had between 1-3 years Koine behind them, but the experience of listening to Greek to try and comprehend was quite new for all of them. I began with some simple expressions of greeting, asking names, some objects, etc.. I'm looking forward to continuing to meet with them, tossing up whether to go into some TPR type activities, or use A… Continue

In some of my spare time I try and track down obscure Latin and Greek books. Particularly I've been trying to gather information and texts relating to WHD Rouse and the direct-method revival around that time that seems to have arisen (and then been swamped). Anyway, Appleton and Jones produced a number of Latin materials at the time, similar in scope to Rouse's "A Greek Boy at Home", from what I can tell. I've just located one of them, "Puer Romanus" which may be of interest to some:…

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John Stuart Blackie produced a marvellous little book in 1875 of dialogues in Greek and Latin, having come to Scotland and been appalled at the weakness of the students in colloquial Latin and Greek. It's well out of copyright, so as soon as I get some more time, I'll be adding it to my (slow to appear) podcasts, and make a copy available of the text. Would that we could unearth more gems like this.

I first started applying technology to my study of classics several years ago. It began with electronic flashcards, which increased my vocabulary learning untold amounts. Then I moved from working on paper to working on computer for reading and annotating texts. But the biggest leap came last year.



For me, a commitment to making classical languages living and active is a underlying burden and principle for both my studies and teaching. I was more than thrilled to see Evan Millner's… Continue