by CanadianGirl » Fri Jul 23, 2010 4:18 pm
Hi-not sure what council of desperation means, but anyway, The situation is this-I had three years of Greek in college & I've sort of studied Greek on my own since then. I am a sub. Latin teacher, also do some other things. I don't have a problem with latin, but I'm extremely discouraged because, after all this time, I still can't read Greek at all. I looked t Xenophon Anabasis(supposed to be pretty easy Greek) and I had a semester with this text, and just couldn't read it-I could guess at a lot of the words, but really I couldn't do it. In school i had NT, Homer, Xenophon, Herodotus and Thucydides, & my professors were very good (Oxford grads), so there's no excuse obviously. I have sort of tutored a couple of people in basic Greek & really liked it, but -you don't have to know anything to teach sort of intro to Greek. So I'm feeling very discouraged at this point, so this is what I have decided to do-I got out my old Pharr Homeric Greek-it's so old the covers are gone-it's worn out, and I got a notebook and I'm just going to sort of go thru from the beginning and "explicate" every word. Like "Mhnin=accus. of the noun mhnis" or what ever. Obviously this will be very labor intensive-it will take a week to do one page. But I'm hoping this will fix the vocab. and grammar in my mind, because after @ nine years total, I still don't know it. If this doesnt work, don't know what I'll do-I have wanted to be able to read Greek since we read Homer in high school, but if you can't do it, you can't do it. So , this is my last-ditch effort. I really, really hate the thought of giving it up, but if you can't do something after @ 9 years, what are you supposed to do. I picked Homer because he isn't my favorite author, but I thought Homer's "intensity" or whatever you call it might help. And I like the way Pharr's book is laid out, though it's really old. Also, there's a certain "prestige" in working with Homer, when people ask what you're doing, so maybe that will help keep me focussed. Anyway, thought you guys might be interested-this is my last shot at Greek, if anybody has any suggestions, go ahead, but obviously I have to do it, or not, by myself. Thanks for listening! PS-It just occured to me-maybe this should be in the General Discussion, so Dear Moderator, feel free to move it!
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