Best greek method

[tico]

And why do you think it's the best?

[GlottalGreekGeek]

Well, Pharr is the only one I got all the way through, and I picked it because I felt it was the best for me. My intention with Greek is to drink deeply from the literature, especially from verse literature. Starting with Homeric Greek, after seeing the opinions of the people here, seemed like the best approach, and Pharr is the most accessible (and arguably the best) way to start in Homeric Greek. So I voted Pharr. However there is no absolute best book - you need a book which fits your learning style and goals.

EDIT : I know absolutely nothing about Schaeffer, but I have at least browsed through the others on your list. I'm fairly confident that all on your list are good books (except maybe Athenaze - but I haven't looked at that one very closely), so I think in any case you would be in good hands.

So, what do you want to read in Greek, have you studied other languages before, and if yes, what approaches worked/didn't work for you?

[cdowis]

The Reading Greek series from Joint Assoc of Classical Teachers.

I did a self-learn, and was able to do a credible job of translating Euripides' Medea after about 12-18 months. But I have a pretty good background in Latin, and learning Greek seemed an extension of my Latin.

They have a good reading course, taking you quickly from the basics to the real stuff, and includes a self-study manual. The grammer book was barely adequate, so I would suggest something else.

[screamadelica]

My method has been more than a little unorthodox:

I started off in a class using Athenaze but I only got through the first eight chapters before I had to drop the semester for a variety of messy medical reasons (I also used Mastronarde as a second text -- it's a habit of mine). A few weeks later, I decided to put my new-found free time to good use by starting Pharr, whom I've been using ever since.

Pharr is excellent but it's very less than ideal for an absolute beginner. The lessons consist of reading sections from a grammar in back, memorizing a set of vocabulary words, and translating from Greek to English and then from English to Greek. It's very dense, fast-moving, and meaty, and it assumes a good control of the basic grammatical concepts (the revised edition's annotations are inadequate for this).

Athenaze is wonderful for the beginning student; it introduces you gradually (sometimes painfully slowly) to the language, with ample exercises and reading sections, and eight or nine chapters should be more than adequate preparation for Pharr or Mastronarde. I'd recommend ultimately using a different course no matter if you're going for Homeric or Attic because Athenaze doesn't introduce the other verb tenses until fairly late in the course, meaning that you'll have to go back and relearn a considerable number of verbs and their principal parts (the book supplies a good many verbs from the very first chapter because it's focused on reading). I also find Mastronarde's and Pharr's grammatical explanations much clearer and more helpful than the bits strewn through Athenaze, and they both use a "one-chapter-one-grammatical-concept" approach.

I haven't finished Pharr yet but I'll almost certainly go to Mastronarde afterwards, which is like Pharr in its strict, regimentalized grammatical approach. It's also a poor choice for a beginner because it's big on memorization and drilling without context and the beginner may lose interest very quickly as a result; on the other hand, the grammatical explanations couldn't be better.

My recommendation: If your goal is Homeric, go through half of Athenaze book 1 then switch to Pharr; if Attic, go through half or all of Athenaze book 1 then switch to Mastronarde once you've got a good grasp of the basics of the language. I haven't read them all, but I can't imagine a better book for beginners.

[William]

I have been studying (Biblical) Greek through Mounce. I am enjoying my time in it, and I feel like I have been learning a lot. The only small criticism I have of Mounce is that some of the information tends to be spoon fed. For instance, early on he gives you paradigms only for the nominative and accusative. I want the whole chart! So what I do is I go to my Brief Introduction to New Testament Greek (an old primer from the turn of the century or slightly later by Samuel Green, also available as a pdf by Textkit) and write out the full paradigm from there.

What I like about Mounce are the multimedia aids. I was worried about my pronunciation since I am not in a class. He covers this in the lectures on the cd. Additionally, there is a lot of support material available from the publisher, including a workbook that I consider to be essential when using the textbook. Other useful aids include flashcards keyed to the textbook and audio cds with a lot of vocabulary spoken in Greek.

I realize this information is of limited use to those not studying Biblical Greek, but for those out there who may be interested I thought I would weigh in.

Happy New Year to all.

WB

[GlottalGreekGeek]

I was able to handle Pharr's fast pace, but I have studied previous languages and I have a general aptitude for picking up new languages. If Greek is the first foreign language you are studying, you should probably start with another textbook first, and then switch to Pharr.

BTW, there is little difference between the edition of Pharr availible for free on Textkit and the edition of Pharr that is currently in print, so unless you absolutely must have an actual book, you don't have to pay any money for it.

[screamadelica]

I was able to handle Pharr's fast pace, but I have studied previous languages and I have a general aptitude for picking up new languages. If Greek is the first foreign language you are studying, you should probably start with another textbook first, and then switch to Pharr.

BTW, there is little difference between the edition of Pharr availible for free on Textkit and the edition of Pharr that is currently in print, so unless you absolutely must have an actual book, you don't have to pay any money for it.

Eh, I wouldn't go that far. Just another foreign language isn't exactly going to cut it... the only languages that most U.S. schools offer are French and Spanish. Colleges offer more, but all but the language enthusiasts drop their French/Spanish like a hot potato once their modern-language requirement is filled. Teachers typically know that few people care or have the aptitude so language instruction is generally poor, dull, and slowly paced, and it doesn't teach how to go about learning a foreign language; it just tries to teach the language (sorry if you knew this: I'm not sure whereabouts you're from). Furthermore, those modern languages couldn't be less similar to Ancient Greek. Greek will be a totally new and often mind-blowing experience to most, previous language experience or no. I am/was conversational in French and Greek has been a heady joy that gives me pleasure and insight every day... but a large part of that is how profoundly different from anything else I've studied it is. Greek is almost like stepping outside of normal reality; it's that exhilirating and alien a way of thinking, hearing, and writing.

But those that give the greatest joy can be the hardest obstacles... the writing is a big one, but it's not as hard as you'd think. I need to write to be able to learn anything, and to my delight I could write the alphabet -- crudely and slowly, but legibly -- within a day or two. It took about a month before I realized that I was writing as quickly as I print in the Roman alphabet (dunno when it actually happened), and now, though it's been only a few months, it's hard to imagine a time when I couldn't read and write the script. Reading is also an interesting experience; like writing, you can watch your skill rapidly develop literally before your eyes. At first I was going letter-by-letter; then I could see the whole word and went syllable-by-syllable; then I could sight-read certain words but had to sound out others; and now I can go left to right pretty smoothly, picking up each word (or unfamiliar syllable) as I go. It's almost magical; don't let it put you off.

Apologies for the tangent. What helped me a lot in preparation:

1) Having taken years and years of French. I put the notion down a bit earlier but learning any language is a liberating experience that takes you out of English and into another way of doing things. Greek is a very different way of doing things.

2) Being a stickler for grammar from childhood: I try not to be but I'm very much an inner pedant. I understood what the subjunctive mood was a decade before I had a word for it and remember looking down on people at a very young age for using poor grammar or even an "if I was" for a hypothetical -- it just sounded wrong and it just was wrong, and whoever was stupid enough to sound like that didn't deserve my respect. This was in second grade or so. I've chilled out tremendously since then (to the point of near-descriptivism except for where it matters) but I've always had a particular spidey sense that knows what a relative clause or an indirect object is. Innate grammatical awareness (can't really say "ability", can you? Everyone's more or less the same) counts for a lot.

3) Reading everything I could about the language, its varieties, its descent from Proto-Indo-European and its relationship to English; practicing the alphabet and pronunciation two days before the first class; reading up on linguistics and linguistic concepts; reading about the pre-history and the history of the language; reading a book of Byzantine history and a brief refresher survey of ancient Greece from prehistory to the Hellenistic Age; and cramming my brain with all things Hellenic and learning an enormous amount about language itself (and the Hellenic language in particular). This last part was also an advantage because reading about phonology sharpens your ear -- a lot -- both to your own speech and to that of others and how sounds interact with one another. It also turns your tongue into a finely-tuned tool rather than just a speech organ and allows you to acquire sounds faster and more accurately and to correct mispronunciations quickly and easily. It certainly doesn't have to be in-depth, but this pre-Greek cramming was the best preparation I had. When I started the class, I knew what to expect and I did tremendously (some people, on the other hand, didn't know what a noun case was!).

The easier you make your learning, especially in the head-over-heels early going when you're just gloriously lost in the language, the more fun it will be.

[GlottalGreekGeek]

For more information on my linguistic background, see my post from about a year ago

viewtopic.php?t=3155&highlight=high+sch ... t+sad+rant

I had studied French (with some Esperanto) on the side for about a year before starting Greek. I got through about 20 lessons of White's First Greek book and then switched to Pharr, though I certainly believe I could have started with Pharr from the start.

I disagree that French and Ancient Greek are so vastly different, at least not so different that the study of the former is not useful for the latter. French is more conservative than English, though English and French are much closer to each other than either is to Greek. I did not really get a good grasp on the Greek middle voice until I realized that it coincided frequently (though not consistently) with French reflexive verbs. A lot in the French tense system corresponds well, though far from perfectly, with the Greek tense system. Also, the uses of the French 'de' correspond with the Greek genitive case better than anything with English (though English still has a genitve/possesive case). Since I studied French mostly on my own, I made a lot of wild experiments with learning styles, and I figured out what worked and what didn't. I also learned how to grasp a full grammar rather than pieces, which certainly speeded up my comprehension of a (mostly whole) Greek grammar.

And for Esperanto, well, the astounding similarity between the Esperanto and Greek accusative cases are apparent to anybody familiar with both languages. It was worth a few weeks of dabbling in Esperanto just to figure that one out

On a completely different tangent, you remind me very much of how I felt/was when I was first studying Greek. If you continue to follow my footsteps, well, enjoy your Ancient Greek honeymoon while it lasts. And then you get to live in the lexicon of your choice