Someone asked me for a Google Docs version of the book, and so this is my quick attempt, as I am involved in dealing with several issues at the moment. Suggestions on whether this is useful, and how to improve it, are welcome, and all of the various formats of this book are available here…
Shira
Another interesting thing about learning a modern language is that they are fluid, and change rapidly. For instance, the bit of the bottom right hand side of this page that got cut off said
κάθομαι στο σπίτι / I’m staying at home (or so I translated it, as evimde oturum, in Turkish, which was the first language that hit me, for some odd reason, in class)
but
μένω στο σπίτι is what is actually said for “I’m staying home”
Meanwhile, the notes cover your first two verbal groups, which are the most used in modern Greek, and pretty simple to conjugate, as they feel just like the ‘er’ and ‘ar’ verbs in Spanish. In class we were only up to percentages and three of the cases in modern Greek (which differ somewhat from Ancient Greek, of course): nominative, possessive, and the accusative/object aka in other language courses as the Genetiv case. It’s pretty cool how all of the cases match both articles and number with the gender and the action being taken. This is far more precise than French, or certainly English, ever dreamed of being. Now I can see why legal and/or literary (correct me if I am wrong, please, ancient history lovers) documents were written in Greek during the ancient Roman period.
As the class was finishing chapter 12, I was still moving through chapter 8, but I was glad that I had chosen to do it that way, since much of the vocabulary that the book used in dialogues in earlier chapters do not show up as officially presented until much later, so I was scouring the book, while I worked on the early chapters, to find the vocabulary and also to complete the halves of the verbal conjugations presented in later chapters. I know that I have mentioned before that I really hated the way the book presented grammar points, but I also disliked the way that our instructor insisted on sticking to the book, while also shutting me down every time I mentioned where I had found any free sources of Greek language learning materials (which the Hellenic American Union, among other groups, prominently offers, and Cool Conjugator was another useful free tool). This is one of the reasons that I tend to dislike taught classes on, well, anything. They always move too slowly, especially when outside of the country where the language is spoken. Another tool that was available back in 2019 is GreekLanguage dot gr but I have not checked lately to see if it is still around. By this point, I had mostly move to taking my notes in Spanish, since working on verbal conjugations are so natural between modern Greek and Spanish. That was when I needed to translate, for a new verb. Practice in conjugating was just like practicing the verbal conjugations in Spanish, which one must do in order to understand anything. For verbs, repetition is about the only technique I can think of, so there is no getting around writing those verb forms at least one time. I generally use a color like green for the present tenses, and red or pink for the past tenses, but it depends on what pens and what paper or post it notes I have available. When you get a lot of new vocabulary at once it is hard to draw much, but certain things like hair and hands are quick and easy stick-figure notes, and hard to forget or get wrong. Unlike Spanish, Greek has quite a few irregular verbs, which you just have to find a way to work into your daily usage (like translating that funny commercial where the guy kept asking ‘Me escuchas? Me escuchas?’) or a language journal, which I also keep when actively working on a language. Even one sentence a day in your target language keeps a lot of the vocabulary fresh in your mind whether you work on all of the words actively or not that day.
Shira
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Click on the ShiraDest site menu, above this post, for pages leading to more posts on various different ways of learning, or, for:
Learning through story:
Babylon5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli Annem, Lupin, La Casa de Papel/Money Heist, or El Ministerio del Tiempo Reviews,
or
Learning via Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,
or
Learning from Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing (including Ann & Anna…)
Thoughtful Readers, please consider sharing the idea of building free learning tools, especially in this phase, and in the upcoming Phase II in a few years, with the #ProjectDoBetter interested folks in your community, and also about how you best learn languages, or other subjects.
Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS
ShiraDest Publishing, and Shira Destinie Jones’ work, in general, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I still think often of these two phrases: “Start with the end in mind,” and though it may be a bit incongruous, “mind the gap.” The first comes from Covey’s second habit, which I always think of as the first, in spite of seeking to understand being the first, if memory serves correctly, and the second, of course, is from the Tube, in London. I thought that I had reviewed this book already, but for some odd reason, perhaps due to a gap in my own mind, I cannot find my review anywhere. I believe that I first read it back in 2002 or 2003, and I vividly recall how that read took me at least six months, astonishing the friend who had given me my copy as a gift, noting that that was the reason I was always seen with pen and paper in my hand (this friend was also my roommate). This book actually changed the way I think about quite a few things. I tried for quite a long time after reading the book to make myself in to a more principle-oriented, rather than people oriented person, before I understood that I first needed to acknowledge my own need for a self-defined set of principles, a bit like the self-defined work that is written about by Victor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning.
After reading this book and looking over my notes, the exercises, and talking to my friends, I then went back over my old personal journals, poetry, and some of my early story writing attempts, before I finally figured out what my personal life’s work is: Project Do Better. It has taken me over twenty years, now, but I am finally sure of that one thing, if nothing else, in my life, at least. I hope that this project will lead to some set of communities making plans for their long term desired outcomes, rather than the idea of #ProjectDoBetter merely becoming another way of bearing witness, as Toni Morrison spoke of, to what we could have done.
I was just commenting on the need to learn other languages, especially several outside of your own native language family, when I thought of the phrase “grammar trap” to describe the effects of one’s native language on the impulse thinking one is taught to speak with as a child. I like this idea. From what brain science has been telling us, if memory serves correctly, new neural pathways are formed as one studies a new language, and particularly when studying a language with a different grammar system from those one is already used to. So, if we need to build new pathways or brain circuits in our brains to handle our foreign languages, what does that make our native language? The grammar you grow up in can keep you stuck in that grammar, and hence in that way of thinking, if you are not sufficiently exposed to other grammatical systems in order to at least know and occasionally remember that there are different ways of viewing the world. Those languages then also go on to help shape our ways of thinking into automatic responses, because that is what we grew up with, and then, those impulses work to shape our general, or normal, or perhaps just our automatic, behavior, based on our knee-jerk reactions, if we do not take care to stop and think before acting. This is one thing that I have seen to be helped by language learning, even, or especially when switching languages to slow down or distance the emotional response, in therapy, spilling over to other real world events. Our language learning can really shape our control of our own impulses and help us take control of the way we see the world, thus helping us to make better decisions. And learning a language to fluency is not even necessary, but studying several languages consistently is. Thanks again to those studies on language study for building empathy, language researchers (I’ll find the article I wrote with the citation later…). Some say that we should be studying at least five to even six languages, not to attain full speaking fluency, but to understand their grammar systems in depth, at the very least. Both for brain training in mental flexibility as well as for learning to see things from very different perspectives.
And that is why my new phrase for one’s native language is “grammar trap.” The opportunity to learn at least one other language is a gift that every person should receive as a public service to the idea of democracy.
Time to go escape my grammar trap, which is English, for a while as I take a writing break to read a bit of my next Alexandre Dumas book, which is a fantasy thriller, apparently! Who knew?! Well, ok, yes, there was Les Mille et Un Fantômes, but still, most of his work is not in that genre. So, sorry for digressing, back to my grammar trap idea. What do you think, fellow Thinkers?
Shira
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Click on the ShiraDest site menu above this post, out in your browser, to read more about Project Do Better’s suggestions for multiple ways of learning, and in particular, for:
Learning through story:
Babylon5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli Annem, Lupin, La Casa de Papel/Money Heist, or El Ministerio del Tiempo Reviews,
or
Learning via Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,
or
Learning from Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing (including Ann & Anna…)
Thoughtful Readers, please consider sharing with the #ProjectDoBetter about how you best learn languages, or other subjects.
Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS
ShiraDest
Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
How any person would react today, in such a situation as Tom finds himself at the climax of the book, depends on the person, and of course, there is no real way to know how any contemporary person would react in a situation from over 150 years ago, given the very different understandings of things, but the reality is that as much as many in the Black community would say that he ought to have found some way to resist, there was no good solution in that situation. Maybe some people would say that he ought to have at least tried to attack, or just been less meek about the whole thing, but the truth is that if Tom had reacted differently, more defiantly, than he did, the other slaves would have suffered even more after he was killed. He knew just as well as everyone else did that the white men could not allow any sort of disobedience to go unchecked, and that further punishment would follow as soon as he died. Tom was displaying a sense of solidarity with the most vulnerable that young angry (mostly male) people rarely understand, even if he did do so in a way that for us today seems far too subservient. Most Black people today would probably agree that Tom ought to have tried to speak up more, to have been less humble, or less submissive. Less ‘white people pleasing’ in some way, but the problem is that most modern people, or rather, most of us who have not lived in actual chains and have all of our skin on our backs, even those of us who know that we had ancestors who were enslaved, we still cannot fully viscerally comprehend how difficult things were for slaves, especially for slaves held in the Deep South, which was even worse than the Upper South (like Maryland and Virginia, where my family roots are from). So, how most Black people today imagine that Tom ought to have reacted may well vary by generation. The younger people today reject my parents’ generation of SNCC and the leadership of Dr. King as even that, in their minds, was not good enough, and my parents generation (the SNCC generation) were far more militant than those of the WWII (who led ‘The Double V’ campaign and urged us in school, as the Lt. Col of my Jr. ROTC class did, to “make the system work”). So there is no one way that Black Americans would react, or imagine that they would have, in Tom’s place, but pretty universally the idea is that he was too humble, too meek, and too much of a White folks pleaser. Also, the history of the Black Face shows, the minstrel shows put on by white actors during the Jim Crow period, had its share of Black people who were seen as collaborators, especially if they helped in mocking the Black community in any way, and that led to the attitude that one must always walk with dignity, held held high, and endeavoring not to allow oneself to be humiliated by the Jim Crow laws, which is very much in a different spirit (or so folks think) to the way in which Tom reacted. But I think that given the historical milieu in which he is placed, that was about the best he could do, especially since he was trying to ensure the well-being, or less harm, of those who had to stay alive after his death. As for placing Tom in his historical context, vs. understanding the more modern Black reaction to Tom’s actions in the book, this requires understanding how it feels to be part of a power and culture deprived out-group over a long period of time, especially a highly persecuted such out-group as the Black community has been in the United States.
Jim Crow laws and the white domination that they institutionalized were not the only ways in which Black Americans were put down as a group. The media was used quite effectively, from ‘Birth of A Nation’ to ‘Gone With The Wind’ to convince and remind everyone, Black folks included, that our place was at the very bottom of society, and that we were never to strive to rise above it. There was even a neighborhood in the capital, on T Street, NW, if I recall correctly, called The Strivers’ Row. It was a block right along the white neighborhood where several well-to-do Colored men (as the term was at that time) had purchased homes and were having problems being allowed to live in them. The mainstream press in the 1920s relentlessly criticized those residents as “striving to get above themselves.” So, the idea of being meek and submissive to white people has always been insulting, and is part of this entire atmosphere of us being put down by the dominant community which fears any of us either ‘passing’ for white, or becoming respected despite being recognized as being Colored/Negro/Black, and ultimately fears us becoming equal with white citizens. So putting us down constantly in every way (you should have seen the hell that they put me through when I lived in Woodbridge, VA, even convincing the only friend I had made over the summer, a white girl whose father was a diplomat, so she had never lived in VA, to stop associating with me if she wanted not to be an outcast herself) was de rigour. And not playing into that constant put down was part of our response, a part of that being the idea that any submissiveness was ‘being an Uncle Tom” because it played into them making us stay in our place.
(I was curious to see what this new Reblog Comment button does, so I thank Birgit for her interesting question about “what would black Americans of today have done in that situation? Whip the overseer??? Or would they have whipped the other slave?” in response to my noting that the phrase ‘An Uncle Tom’ is used in a very derogatory way. This was my reply, on this review. #ProjectDoBetter works to provide tools so that this never has to happen again, in the old way with whips, or in the modern way, with homelessness. -Shira)
ShiraDestProjectDoBetter
Both of these books have been reviewed here previously, but bear mentioning again. The first is a book 
written based on a report issued over 50 years ago, whose implementation the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King cited as the one action that would have prompted him to immediately call off the Memphis Garbage Workers’ Strike, only a day or two before he was shot. Unfortunately, that report, by The Kerner Commission, was buried and forgotten for many years.
The second book, carrying the long title of Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 
is one that is very long, and very complex, but very much worth the effort to read, multiple times. This book, on the history of The Reconstruction after the US Civil War, is a classic. This work by Du Bois is mentioned as a key support in an interview, linked just below, by professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore as a large part of how we can begin to come to understand how history bears remembering and understanding in order to find ways to solve our current problems and move toward a society that looks more like Phase IV of Project Do Better, linked below the end of this article, in the signature,
where there is enough, at the very least, for each and every person in this country, and hence no need for the current prison system as we know it today, in the form of the toxic and inhumane prison industrial complex. Abolition of this prison system, in her interview, is directly related to a belief in the value of life, as this interview title relating to the preciousness of life, and to the ability for everyone to make a just living, points out. A just and safe world for all, as professor Wilson Gilmore advocates, would result naturally from following the plan set laid out by Project Do Better, if a sufficient number of communities in our country took it up with willing hands and hearts for the Common Good. Both of these books, and the Project Do Better book waiting to be molded by community organizers into separate manuals for their communities, are essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how the United States got to this point, and how we could work toward “a more perfect Union” together.
Shira
Action Items:
1.) Share your thoughts on how history can guide us to better solutions for today, while preventing us from making the same old mistakes, please.
2.) Write a story, post or comment that uses those thoughts, and then share with us, here, if you please.
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Click on the ShiraDest site menu, at the top above this post, please for webpages linking to posts on:
Learning through story in writing and in motion via: Babylon5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli Annem, Lupin, La Casa de Papel/Money Heist, or El Ministerio del Tiempo Reviews,
and then, traditionally, in classrooms:
Learning via Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,
or
Learning from Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing (including Ann & Anna serial chapters, and Who By Fire draft scenes…).
And, if you still have a spare moment for reflection:
Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter. This set of book reviews is my personal way (as opposed to founding the Project, overall) of contributing to the work of building tools that could help increase both empathy and compassion in this world. Learning in a variety of ways is important for building that mental flexibility which helps us make sense of and define our actions in this world. And remember how important tool-building is also as part of this project. Let’s work together to Do Better, please.
Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS
ShiraDest Publications, and Shira Destinie Jones’ work in general, is usually licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Where not so, it is mentioned explicitly. This is so far only the case with the Who By Fire rough draft, which can be made, upon request, freely available to a good home intending to bring it to birth for the benefit of Humanity.
From the workbook that goes with the horrible text book. Off on the right hand side, the words
I love how similar the grammar is, at least for verbal conjugations, between Castillian Spanish and modern Greek! Practice in handwriting and with using the basic verbs is always a very good way to start learning a language, even using a poor textbook. Basic words and phrases are also easy for reviewing the handwriting in other languages, but not as easy when some of those languages run the opposite direction! Making up sentences in each language with the new verbs certainly helps them stick in the long term memory faster, but colored pens help even more (although, yes, it is a pain in the neck to change pens for each language, and that does slow down the note-taking process). I love how similar the words from different language-family speakers around the Mediterranean are for words like Mom! As different as their grammatical systems can be, mama, mama, maman, anne, and imma all sound similar, perhaps due to the basics of the human soft palate and mouth-related motor abilities at the infant stage?
Shira
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Click on the ShiraDest website main menu, above this post, for:
Learning through story:
Babylon5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli Annem, Lupin, La Casa de Papel/Money Heist, or El Ministerio del Tiempo Reviews,
or
Learning via a free 67 day set of Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,
or
Learning from Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing (including Ann & Anna…)
Thoughtful Readers, please consider sharing with the #ProjectDoBetter about how you best learn languages, or other subjects.
Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS
ShiraDest
Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This week instead of, ok, or actually, in addition to, my usual SoL Saturday PSA about consumer legal learning as a free resident right, more about that here, I wish to wonder why NPR chose to bury this article about four pages down on the site, Tuesday morning, August 15th. Ok, I know that there is a great deal more urgent news out there, particularly today, but the important work is being, or so it seems to me, forgotten. Like this one on yet another reason that we need a Single Payer health care System, starting by supporting our current public health care system:
Even doctors are being taken advantage of by the lobbies that get such laws passed to suit their interests:
”
An industry of middlemen had begun sprouting up, processing payments for insurers and skimming fees off the top. Sometimes they shared a portion of the fees with insurers, too. ”-from NPR’s Cezary Podkul…
This is also a legal consumer protection issue, even if it only applies to a small segment of the population, it is a small set of people who serve all of us, and need to have their time free to be care-takers of the public health, and to keep up on the latest changes in medicine, not the latest changes in their insurers electronic payment policies. This is where public health and public legal financial protection intersects in key manner for public safety, and communities can do something about it, by advocating with local doctor’s offices and health clinics to ensure that charges are not made for electronic payments, as part of a larger community plan for dealing with both public legal financial law advocacy and public health, at the same time. That is why both issues are part of Phase I of the freely available and community editable Project Do Better man. See the link below to request a copy of the editable document for your commuity.
Shira
Action Items:
1.) Share your thoughts on Phase I of Project Do Better (see link below for more details…) and the need to augment and support local public health clinics and free legal clinics, even for doctors, please.
2.) Write a story, post or comment that uses those thoughts, especially if it is part of your community edition of the Project Do Better Man.
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Click on the main webpage of the ShiraDest website, on the main menu of this post page, for:
Learning via Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans, show reviews, and more about Project Do Better, of which these SoL Saturday PSA handouts are one part of Phase I.
Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about the nonviolent phased in plan sets for solving our important problems, while also addressing the urgent issues like Climate Change in the first phase, as proposed by #ProjectDoBetter. This work is part of my little drop in the ocean in the hope that, while we still have time, we as a society will decide to Do Better.
Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS
ShiraDest Publishing
Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This note set lacks colors, and it makes it far less easy to remember these notes. Like being on drab colorless busses and trains.
Better public transit, btw, would also help more people to learn more languages because they spend less time stuck in traffic in their cars, and more time able to read or talk, on a bus, train, or trolley. Or even walking together.
Due to the interest that my fellow language learners, here on the ShiraDest blog, and other readers as well, have expressed in getting more language learning tips, I thought I would share some of my experience in studying languages. I hope to add more to these language learning tips from my point of view as a polyglot, after I have found more communities interested in editing their own versions of the Project Do Better man.
Shira
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Click on the main menu of the ShiraDest web page if you are interested in more about :
Learning through Babylon 5, Hakan:Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli Annem, Lupin, or La Casa De Papel/Money Heist Reviews,
Holistic College Algebra & GED/HiSET Night School Lesson Plans,
or My Nonfiction & Historical Fiction Serial Writing
Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading and sharing, or even writing a guest blog post here, about #ProjectDoBetter. Phase I aims to build empathy for public goods (libraries, transit, healthcare, and education) via language study and story, among other tools.
Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil
Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This week I forgot to schedule my usual SoL Saturday PSA. Please find out, if you don’t already know, what your state or District laws are for the four types of Statues of Limitations on debt, and share with someone you know. Please go see the link to read more about this crucial topic via the original essay, here...
Shira
Action Items:
1.) Share your thoughts, please.
2.) Write a story, post or comment that uses those thoughts.
*****************
Click here for:
Learning via Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,
Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter. This work is part of my little drop in the ocean in the hope that, while we still have time, we as a society will decide to Do Better.
Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS
ShiraDest Publishing
Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Context, Thought, and Learning: ShiraDest Offers Project Do Better 