From: Jonathan Robie (Jonathan.Robie@SoftwareAG-USA.com)
Date: Sat Jan 06 2001 - 09:33:38 EST
At one level, this comes down to the design of specific features in the software.
It is not harmful, IMHO, to be able to find the definition of a word by clicking on it and pulling up a lexicon. How is that worse than looking up the word in a book? Some would argue that the extra effort of having to go to the shelf and leaf through the pages may encourage people to learn their vocabulary. If this advantage exists, then it is probably more than offset by the availability of flashcard programs to drill vocabulary and morphology.
Is it harmful to be able to get the morphological parse codes for a word by waving a mouse over it? If you never learn to actually parse the forms for yourself, then you are clearly limited to reading the Greek on the screen, and to using an analytical process that is different from normal reading. On the other hand, if this feature allows you to read things you could not have read before, perhaps because you do not recognize a specific form, then it increases your exposure to reading real Greek prose. All to the good. *However*, I find it tremendously irritating that most software programs I have used do not allow me to navigate from a verb in the text to a table in a morphology that explains how I could have recognized the verb form for myself. And from there, I would like to be able to navigate to a flashcard program that allows me to drill myself on that form...
Jonathan
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