Greek Alive

{campus life}

Greek Alive!

An Interview with Christophe Rico

interview by El'ad Nichols-Kaufman '25

Christophe Rico is the Dean of Polis, the Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanity, and a professor of Greek Philology at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem. He has pioneered the Polis method, which involves studying living and ancient languages in a full immersion environment.

Nichols-Kaufman: Just to start off with, could you explain a little bit about what the Polis method is?

Rico: First, full immersion. This is not something which is exclusive to Polis. Secondly, we have another main principle: we try to teach the language according to an algorithm that is natural to that very language. When I wrote the method of Greek, one of the most difficult things for me was to find the proper order of elements to be taught so that the process of acquisition of the language would be as smooth as possible.

Something that helps a lot is to see what happens with children when they learn their mother tongue. Of course, we don't have any studies on children learning ancient Greek in antiquity, but we do have very interesting studies on modern Greek children learning their mother tongue. Even though modern Greek is quite different from ancient Greek, you still have many elements that are common in the structure of both languages. For instance, in both ancient modern Greek, there are two categories of imperative, the present tense imperative and the aorist imperative. It's very interesting to see that modern Greek children learn the aorist imperative first, and only afterwards they assimilate the present tense imperative. We take into account the results of this research on children's language acquisition in our own way of setting these steps.

There are some steps that are very important in any language. You start with greetings because this is the first thing you need in order to communicate. When you start a conversation, you start with greetings. “Hello, how are you?” “thank you,” “bye bye,” these kinds of things. Then you have the second step, and it's the most common imperative: “get up,” “sit down,” “run,” “give me that,” “show me this,”. Next you have the deictics: “this is that,” “this is this,” “what is this?” “What is that?” That has to come at the very beginning, then we can move on to other elements of the language. If this natural order is followed, the acquisition process goes very quickly.

Once we have talked about the principles, we have the techniques. One of them is TPR, total physical response. You ask someone to do something, she or he does it and then she or he gives the same command to somebody else, and you learn through commands and things that you do or that you are asked to do. Then you have the storytelling, telling stories and asking questions in a way that is understandable by those who are listening to you. Then you have another technique which is called story building, where you have a story which is told through images. For each image you ask the students to say what they are seeing. Then you have other techniques, like working in small groups to talk, because you have the input followed by the output. If there is no output, you are not going to learn a language.

There are many techniques like this to reinforce what has been learned through reading easy texts within the language. In the case of ancient Greek, if we look at ancient literature we have very few easy texts for beginners. So you have to make them up. One of the things we have done recently is to publish a translation of Hansel and Gretel into ancient Greek that was prepared for those who had finished only the first book, which means after 120 hours of instruction you can already read. Each time you have a new word that the student doesn't know, you have in the margins an explanation of the word which is given in ancient Greek with the words they already know, or else you have an illustration that helps understand what happened and what the word is about.

Then there is a technique which is specific to the Polis method called living sequential expression. It is based on an idea of François Goiun, who lived at the end of the 19th century. His idea is that the first logical connection that a child will make in their head is sequentiality. In some activities, there is something that you do first and something that you do afterwards. So he tried to teach French with the same pattern through sequentiality. He has a famous example: to open a door. So I stand up, I go towards the door, I put my hand on the handle, I open the door, I get out of the room, I close the door behind me. He was very surprised to see that it worked, that children really became very interested in the language when they had the opportunity because he was repeating the same process.

Based on his inspiration, we have developed this method of the series to a new technique, living sequential expression. What we have done is to try to figure out what are the most common activities, the activities that we perform several times a day. So there is a very basic activity: I stand up, I walk, I stop, and I sit down. There are also activities that we do perhaps once a day, or once every week or once a month. And then you arrive at around 300 activities that are performed sometime during your life that are more or less frequent. And then these activities comprise each of them, with six or seven verbs or six or seven small sentences. When you become able to talk about what you do several times every day, or once every day or what you do once a week, or what you do once a month or once every year, you can talk about virtually anything.

These are things that matter for training with the students. So, you start with the imperative. For instance, in the example of riding the bus, you tell the student to go to the bus stop, and the student has to go to an imaginary bus stop to wait for the bus, for the bus to come to get into the bus, and so on. At the end you ask the students “What have you done?” And the student has to say the same thing in whatever tense we’re learning. This gives students the tools to develop their vocabulary and acquire at the same time all the morphology of the language. This is more or less the Polis method.

Nichols-Kaufman: At St. John's, one of our focuses in teaching languages is understanding the logic of the language. Greek is a very synthetic language. To speakers of mostly analytic English, concepts like the aorist tense, or the use of a participle, can be difficult without being able to kind of discuss and process them in English. How can this be addressed in a full immersion environment? How do you grasp these things that don't have a parallel in the student’s native language?

Rico: Well, first of all, we think that before reflecting about the language, you first have to acquire the language. That's the first step. You can reflect about what you have acquired, but not about what you are just learning. There is a difference between learning and acquiring. Learning is like learning like a parrot or just by heart or in a superficial way. And acquiring is learning and becoming able to use what you have learned. So that really has to be the beginning.

But then within the Polis method, there is an explicit teaching of grammar. At one stage, of course, if it was your very first language or if we had a lot of time, you could just learn the language without reflecting about grammar. As a child, you learn at school that there is such a thing as grammar. At Polis, we start acquiring the language through an immersive way. Very soon, there are the first elements of reflection on the grammar, developed within the language. So it has to be conducted very slowly and adapted to the capacity to command the language that the students have. And then building upon that, you have a reflection on the language. The idea is not that there isn’t an explicit teaching of grammar in the Polis method, but the explicit teaching of grammar comes once that grammar has been assimilated.

Nichols-Kaufman: To wrap up, I’ll ask a question that I think often asked of me: why? Ancient Greek is a language which is no longer spoken, and acquisition of the language is mostly directed towards translation of texts, many of which have already been translated. Why is it worth studying by immersion?

Rico: One reason is that there are many texts that are still not translated. The second reason is even when they are translated, sometimes they are poorly translated. And even when they are well translated, you have to convey an idea that is given with a specific image in one language. You have to put it in a very different way in the target language. And then, even if you get that, there still is a very famous saying which is lost in translation. You always lose something. I would say that translations are like the text in black and white and flat, and the original is in color, full colors, full of ups and downs and all the variety. There is a big difference between the original and the translation, even if you take texts that have been translated so many times, like the Bible. To speak the language, and really have acquired it, is something that obliges you to enter into the logic of the language and understand things that you wouldn't understand if you only had the translation.