Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
2people
2024–2026years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For ancient Greek, two great books are:
Greek: an Intensive Course by Hansen and Quinn.
Basics of Biblical Greek by William Mounce
Both are standard texts with solutions easily available online.
- Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek and the workbook were good enough that I stopped watching the lectures. The workbook is excellent. Can't recommend it enough.
- So the theory behind Guided Immersion is that you shouldn't need most of that. When Priscilla and Aquilla were learning Greek, nobody sat them down and said, "Now definite articles are inflected according to gender, number, and case: ho, hoi, ..." They were just given example after example, and the language processing unit of their brains figured it out.
So Guided Immersion tries to just give you not only vocab, but grammar in such a way that there's always only a handful of concepts you haven't mastered.
I developed Guided Immersion to help myself master Mandarin, actually; I used Anki with Mandarin for probably 8 years before developing Guided Immersion; once I switched I never went back. Then about a year and a half ago ago I ported it over to Koine Greek not knowing any Greek, and started using it myself after watching a handful of YouTube Videos introducing the characters and the basic cases.
Maybe it's just the way my brain works, but I can't imagine sitting down and trying to memorize all those endings, particularly for the verbs.
I have now bought Mounce's "Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar", and "The Morphology of Biblical Greek", to help me refine the "language schema" the algorithm uses. I appreciate the work Mounce has done to find the deeper morphological rules which make sense of what look like "irregular" inflections; teaching the algorithm about those will certainly help it to present things in a more useful way to learners. But I don't think trying to grind through all that in your conscious mind is the way to go.
