Learning Ancient Greek Part I
Intro
Our resident Greek scholar is Ambulator. My (Rogerius’) introduction to the Greek language was relatively recent and I thought I might share a little bit of the process as a trek along.
Contents
A Summary of the Journey so far
As a Latin instructor, I was always sensitive to the fact that I knew nothing about its sister language, but The Attic tongue never seemed to grip me the way Latin did. No labor of mine, therefore, was ever expended in its acquisition, since, as far as I was concerned, time spent in Greek was time lost in Latin. About a year and a half ago, I made half-hearted attempt to learn, having come to the realization that most of our original Western literature is of Greek origin, not Latin, and I picked up Crosby and Schaeffer An Introduction to Greek, the textbook of choice for the highschool which at that time had me in its employ. The overwhelming introduction to the foreign alphabet, accents, breathing, iota subscripts, articles, pronunciation, and the lack of external aids available forced me to put the book down almost as quickly as I had picked it up. I had made other light attempts to read the Orbergian-style Athenaze but found even the first couple of pages almost entirely untelligible.
After a few months of making no progress, I resolved to make a heartier essay on the Crosby and Schaeffer book, and began studying the ο-stem declension. I memorized the endings, more or less, and slowly but surely made my way through the first of the book’s copious exercises.
In order to make any meaningful progress at all, I found myself having to ignore all accentuation marks (at the time I even believed the iota subscript to be a kind of accent) since there were so many rules that demanded what seemed like a kind of prerequisite familiarity with Greek.
The grammatical similiarity to Latin allowed me, I think, to make swift(ish) progress through the first two declensions and –ω verbs. Life got busy, however, or I grew lazy, and before I knew it, months had passed without any heed for Greek at all, until I resolved once again to start the Crosby and Schaeffer book over. I completed the first forty or so lessons and began finding some of the translations quite difficult. Returning to the first volume of Athenaze, I reread all of the chapters I had previously read, until I met with more resistance than I could manage to relieve.
I am now in my third round of real dedicated study and having redone the first forty lessons of Crosby and Schaeffer for the third time as a kind of review, I am now back up to about chapter 50. It seems that I have encountered a lot of the basics but I have yet to study –μι verbs beyond their conservative use in the second volume of Athenaze, nor have I learned the perfect, or pluperfect tenses. There is still very much to learn, but I have been encouraged by a new method of study (which I will briefly lay out below) that has cut down on some of the overwhelming obstacles blocking my progress before.
Challenges
Before I lay out how I have been studying lately, I thought I would explain some challenges peculiar to my study of Greek.
Subscript/Superscript
As I mentioned earlier, the array of subscript/superscript markings are scarcely intelligible in the beginning. Even now, a year and a half later, they constitute for me mere periphery information, and I don’t usually pay them too much mind except in certain circumstances where their placement alters the meaning of a word, such as the accent in the word ἐστί which, apparently, when it contains an accent on the penultimate syllable (ἔστι) means “it is possible”. Likewise the 2nd person singular passive imperative (κέλευσαι) looks an awful lot like the aorist infinitive (κελεῦσαι), distinguished only by the placement of the accent. I plan to learn the rules more carefully later in my study when I have a much larger vocabulary repository at my disposal.
Inflection
A Greek verb can be inflected in so many more ways than a Latin verb. The addition of the aorist tense, middle voice, and optative mood, as well as all of the new participles add to the already long list of inflections to acknowledge. Unlike Latin, Greek verbs suffer some inflection in their prefix, which makes seeking unfamiliar vocabulary in a lexicon much more difficult since, for me at least, it involves an educated guess as to the augments and contractions.
Conditions
I don’t find the general concept of conditions too confusing, but the Crosby and Schaeffer book piles on different kinds of conditional sentences pretty early on. It is difficult to remember which conditions demand the subjunctive, indicative, or the optative. I would expect any kind of unreal condition to involve a subjunctive mood, but that is not always the case in Greek, so long as certain other words are present in the sentence.
Lack of Answer Key
There is a teacher’s manual for Crosby and Schaeffer online, but it only contains answers for some of the exercises, namely the English to Greek translations and the fill in the blank portions. The inability to check my work has been frustrating.
My Current Method of Study
I can’t claim to have figured out the perfect process for learning Greek. Far from it, in fact. But I thought that some might find a spirit of camaraderie in hearing how a fellow student is making progress.
In the beginning, I was much more concerned with correctly translating from English to Greek, but I have almost entirely shifted my focus now to reading/translating from Greek to English. I no longer write any of the exercises down unless I am completely stumped and will read and translate the exercises in my head. Before I begin a new lesson, I often try to run through the entire inflected verb paradigm for a simple –ω verb, since many of the forms still give me pause, especially contracted forms.
I no longer translate the English to Greek exercises, since they are frankly just too far beyond my ability to produce without a very laborious page flipping process. Most of the time, I don’t even come close to the correct answer. I have found it much more fruitful and much more time effective to simply look at the answers, learn what I can, and move on. I will worry about producing Greek myself later down the road.
I have been spending much more time in the Crosby and Schaeffer book, but I plan to go back through and reread the first Athenaze volume again just to review vocabulary and to get a better grasp of how Greek sentences operate.
Below is an affiliate link to the Greek book I have been using if you are interested in trying something new. I won’t try to sell you on it since I have not tried many other books, but if you are already planning to purchase the book, buying it through my link will help support our site a bit.
– Rogerius