Learn Ancient Greek Better with Music: Byzantine Chant

Psalm 139 in Byzantine Chant Notation

 This weekend my wife and I showed my son Disney's The Lion King (1994) for the first time. I last saw it in the late '90's, and yet I still had essentially every song memorized. Now if only I could find a way to free up that space for some more paradigms!

As anyone will tell you, it's easiest to memorize something when it's been put to music. So how can you use this in your Greek studies, and does this Hakuna Matata principle (problem-free philology?) really transfer over into Second Language Acquisition (2LA)?  

Background

There is a lot of research on the impact of music on the brain and also on first language acquisition, but more work is still needed for 2LA.

One recent study broke a cohort of EFL students into three groups. One was taught English using only music, one half-music, and finally one without music. When tested for vocabulary retention 3wks after the completion of instruction, the all-music group performed best, with the half-music group performing the worst. The authors had some possible theories as to why half-music performed worse than no-music, but more work would need to be done. What we can conclude though, is that extensive music in the target language was effective for vocabulary retention.

If you love research, check out this literature review article by Rieb and Cohen. They provide an overview of all the ways music and language learning has been studied, including the shared neurological responses to music and language, and how music aids in recall. 

Suggested uses

My aims are less lofty than what the above scholars have set out to accomplish. I had a very specific language learning niche I was hoping to fill using music: redeeming my grocery shopping.

I love to read, but I have more time spent during the day performing low-cognitive-load tasks than I do free time to commit to reading. Because of this, I consume far more books through audio than I do reading directly. 

What I wanted to do was utilize this time to consume Greek texts as well. While I can listen to the audio Greek New Testament (typically listening at 0.8x speed), the number of books/chapters that I am familiar enough with to follow along while bagging my milk is somewhat limited. But, if I take the time to learn a song, I can work on simpler ear training. Overtime, I've found that my ability to process Greek has increased, to where I'm following along for songs without having studied them beforehand. It's always a nice surprise!

Thankfully there are a large number of songs out there using ancient/Koine Greek that are easy to learn and are enjoyable too.

Here's the easiest: The Trisagion

This edition is even in Greek (modern pronunciation) and English, so if you lose your way with the Greek, the translation isn't too far away. To learn about the history of this ancient hymn, read the Wikipedia article.

My favorite Greek hymn is Psalm 136. Not only does it re-tell the history of Israel, but there is a lot of repetition built in.

This Psalm is put to a very fast beat, that draws you in quickly. My son really enjoys this one, and we've started learning it one verse at a time. When you do that, you are not only memorizing original Koine Greek, but you are also singing along to a Psalm that has been sung by Christians for thousands of years.

Modern and newly composed Greek music will follow in another post, but for now, here are a few extra resources:

To find songs on YouTube, use 'ψαλτηριον' as your search term.

My favorite album.

An accomplished Byzantine Chanter

To turn YouTube videos into MP3s, use NewPipe on Android, or any number of websites that offer that functionality.

Do you use music in your study? Do you have any favorite songs? Share them in the comments!