2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

CLASSICS I Jesus College Annual Report 2013 13
On Learning Classical Greek
Anthony Bowen
A Fellow looks back over sixty years’ engagement with Classical Greek
I
started learning ancient Greek aged 12.
Compared with boys at established
preparatory schools, I was two years behind
already. When my headmaster declared after
a term that he knew no more (he hadn’t
taught Greek for years), my father, who
taught French at Reading University,
arranged for me to start the morning twice a
week not at school but in the Greek
beginners’ class taught by Professor
Cormack in the university.
In short trousers I joined young men and
women of 19 and 20. First we did the
grammar. I could do that; I’d started Latin
and French aged 8. My classmates mostly
found it difficult not just to memorise the
declensions, conjugations and vocabulary but
also to manage the Greek penchant for
irregularity.
The next term we read Plato’s Apology. They
enjoyed that. I hadn’t a clue what was going
on, but I found that diligent attention to the
syntax allowed me to translate quite
accurately, and that helped a lot when I
returned to catching up my contemporaries.
Of course, I was too young for Socrates and
many of them were too old for easy language
learning. Nothing matches the success of
children learning their mother tongue;
perhaps we never concentrate on anything so
well again, but the mother tongue goes into a
different part of the brain from languages
learnt more consciously, and comparisons
with mother tongue learning are not helpful,
except to note the fate of so-called wolfchildren,
those who completely miss a
context of human speech in their first years:
they never catch up at all (the classic case is
that of the wild boy of Aveyron, taken in hand
by Dr J M G Itard who first wrote him up in
1801).
The human brain if not stimulated in time
clearly passes a point at which its Chomskyan
capacity for language learning no longer
works. I suspect there is another moment,
linked to puberty, when rote learning in its
turn becomes very difficult. Children can get
to know, and take great pride in knowing, a
vast amount of fact: for boys, it may be
biographies of pop stars and footballers,
dates of kings and queens, specifications of
cars, planes and trains (I’m not quite sure
what the equivalents are for girls); similar are
declensions and conjugations. Some of it we
wanted to know and some of it we needed to
know; it was all grist to the same mill. We
learnt a piece of poetry every week; only some
of it remains with me because I repeated only
some of it after it had served its purpose in
class, but the sheer experience of learning it
was, I am sure, helpful in learning other
things (and something else, about rhythm,
stuck very deep). We did not as children
understand all the poetry we learnt, but if you
have it in the head, understanding will come
as you mature, and I’d rather have it put there
imperfectly understood than not have it there
at all.
All teachers know the quarrel, however,
between learning a thing when you need it
and learning it in case you need it.
There may be another staging point in the
weakening of the ability to learn which comes
some time after puberty, or perhaps we lose
capacity steadily. I remember a woman of a
certain age, as the French say, who was in a
group I was teaching at the JACT Greek
summer school in Cheltenham 35 years ago.
After three days she said, “Oh Mr Bowen,
I just can’t remember it as fast as the rest of
them do, but please can I stay on?”. She
would have suffered the same in any other
group, and she stayed, but I had to be careful
in asking her questions.
Some of all that was with me, I like to
think, when in 1990, after nearly 30 years of
school teaching I returned to Cambridge at
the invitation of the Faculty of Classics to set