Today I discovered how spoiled I have become in my foreign language studies.
Take French and German, for example. For each of these languages, I had a pocket dictionary at my disposal. In the case of French, I also had a bigger Larousse dictionary and a Bescherelle verb conjugation dictionary to reference when working through things. These were all very helpful, but the tool I used the most (much to the chagrin of my professors, I'm sure) was wordreference.com. Unlike online tools like Google Translate, WordReference doesn't translate entire phrases, but just acts as a thorough online dictionary. Type in a word, get several possible translations back. Easy. If you don't understand a word, it takes all of about 5 seconds to figure it out. In fact, I still use WordReference frequently when I'm translating letters and such for my job.
Here's the problem. Ancient Greek doesn't have an online translator.
And that is really, really not cool.
So instead of typing in my query and getting a translated result back in 0.365 seconds, I have to spend anywhere from 5-10 minutes searching for unfamiliar words in the giant lexicon, the back of my textbook, or the back of my Greek New Testament, in the "dictionary." That's 5-10 minutes PER WORD...and the Greek words that I don't understand are plentiful. The time adds up fast.
The problem with all this is that you have to know the "lexical form" to look up the word...which often doesn't look anything like the word you're trying to find, because Greek has like 50 different spellings for practically every word in the language, depending on its usage.
Say you have the word "elelutha" in front of you, for example: to ascertain its meaning, you need to know to look up the word "erkomai." And those don't look the same, now do they? And that's even one of the easy ones to remember...
And of course, you get all the Greek characters involved, so in the time it takes you to find a possible definition you've forgotten which word you were trying to look up in the first place, and have also probably lost your spot on the page. And of course, by the time you find your spot on the page, you've lost your spot in the lexicon. It's a vicious cycle.
So while I was working on Greek for a whopping 11 hours today (to be continued for another 1-2 hours after I post this), it dawned on me how truly spoiled 21st century language-learners have become. We can have everything on modern languages at the click of a button, and it's REALLY nice. Even the magical analytical Greek lexicon, which lists words in all their forms (and which I discovered in the library today), still takes awhile to get through, and really only adds another book to the pile.
And so I admit it. I've become spoiled in my foreign language pursuits.
So now, three days from the end of the course, I've begun to realize why the nickname around seminary for my summer Greek intensive course is "Suicide Greek." As I told my friend T.Wes in the library today, if something goes wrong with my salvation and I wind up in hell, I'm pretty sure you'll find me at a dimly lit library table, under a stack of Greek lexicons and scattered with scratch paper.
Only three days, two tests, one quiz, and translating all of 1 Thessalonians to go!
