Morituri te salutat

I had been pleased with myself.

In the week and a half since my Greek precessional and the commencement of first semester today, I had thought I'd made some progress. I'd drawn up charts for the Greek alphabet and stuck them up on the back of the bathroom door, where I could contemplate (and memorise) the Greek alphabet at leisure. I had also drawn up a table of the noun and definite article declensions in masculine, feminine, and neuter singular and plural nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative cases. I'd also constructed some flash cards with various items of grammar and vocab.

And I'd also studied. No, seriously, I had studied. Indeed, I had reached the point where I could write out the Greek alphabet in both capitals and script (in sequence, if you don't mind), and had also been able to construct the full declension for some basic words. So I figured I'd made some progress, if not exactly become a star pupil. Granted, I was still having trouble with the vocab, as well as remembering where pesky little items such as breathing marks (for pronunciation) and iota subscripts (I won't even try and explain that one to you) went. But all in all, I reasoned, not a bad start. I was looking forward to today's lesson.

Nothing like an actual lecture to knock the stuffing out of you.

Well, okay, not the stuffing, exactly, but certainly my illusions. When we started the lesson with a review of the work canvassed in the precessional, I realised that I didn't know diddly squat. I had forgotten about the partial declension pattern for proper nouns, as well as the irregular declension pattern for feminine nouns (which results in feminine nouns ending in "alpha" changing their form from "alpha" to "eta" in the genitive and dative singular if the penultimate letter is not "epsilon", "iota", or "rho"). I'd also forgotten about postpositives and how they go between the positive article and the noun, as well as "epsilon/iota" ending that makes a noun a verb and means "I/he/she/it performs the action of the verb".

You get my drift!

So you can imagine my joy upon learning that today's lesson would cover prepositions, and all the tricky little rules and variations that go with them. My personal favourites are the triple-meaning prepositions; that is, prepositions that have three different meanings depending on whether the noun that is their subject is in the genitive, dative, or accusative case. What bliss, I thought, reaching for the aspirin; now I only have to remember the same word in three different forms and meanings! What could be simpler!

No kidding, Greece may well have been the cradle of Western civilisation, but they knew sweet FA about making knowledge - never mind learning - easy to access.

This whole experience reminds of the story about the English cricketer who was asked what it was like facing the terrifying fast bowling of the West Indian cricket team. He is said to have paused thoughtfully, then responded: "Tell me, did you ever watch the film Zulu and wonder what it was like to be one of the British redcoats facing the charge of the impis?"

I know exactly what he's talking about.

Talk to you soon,

BB.

Quote for the Day: Education is what remains after what one has learned has been forgotten. (B F Skinner)