Okay I'm not taking Greek next year after all

Here you can discuss all things Ancient Greek. Use this board to ask questions about grammar, discuss learning strategies, get help with a difficult passage of Greek, and more.
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Aurelia
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Okay I'm not taking Greek next year after all

Post by Aurelia »

I'm very sad about this because I've been waiting a long time to take this class but I'm trying to be optimistic.

What are your thoughts about independent study? I'm going to have a hectic schedule during school but I really want to learn Greek.

Eureka
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Post by Eureka »

carpe diem. (Or some Greek equivalent. :? )

My schedule is hectic too, but there's always a little time here and there.

Titus Marius Crispus
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Post by Titus Marius Crispus »

They don't even offer Greek at my school.. :cry:

Luckily one of my Certamen coaches took Greek in college, so he'll be able to help with the pronunciation. Pronunciation and the fact that Greek doesn't use the "Roman" alphabet seem like the 2 major stumbling blocks for me.

I am currently waiting very anxiously for the arrival of my H&Q. I just can't take learning from PDFs.

Aurelia
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Post by Aurelia »

Actually Greek isn't offered at my school either, it goes through the University. So if I take it I'd be a 16 year old taking a college course. 8) My Latin teacher teaches it.
Pronunciation and the fact that Greek doesn't use the "Roman" alphabet seem like the 2 major stumbling blocks for me.
I feel your pain. :wink:

I think I'm going to do independent study using the JACT Greek Course with one of my friends and someone to help me online. I'm going to aim for next year to take this course. That would be better in the long run anyway, don't you think?

chad
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Post by chad »

hi aurelia, re your qn above, i think lots/most of the people here are learning greek independently, despite being busy, and some have already got to an advanced stage, because with the net you have access to everything u need. e.g. an excellent greek textbook: pharr: was just put online here on textkit yesterday. if you wanted to work through that, there are (at least) 2 experts here who have worked through the whole book, and have websites with all the answers for the first chunk of the book, along with explanations of the hard bits; also there are around 10(?) people here who are working through the exercises now, and i think another mailing list group is going to start later in the year; there are lots of recordings of homer on the net, so you won't miss out on the pronunciation side if you listen to those; there are essays on learning homer on Professor Harris' classics website, and there's a book here on homeric style for downloading...

plus you've got a few years of latin, so pharr's teaching style is perfect for you (he assumes a bit of latin knowledge).

if ever you can't figure out a greek word, you can type it into perseus' online dictionary and get all the grammatical details; or you can of course ask someone here. you can also email classics professors and academics with classics websites with questions about the stuff on their sites: they've always respond helpfully to me. i've never felt like i'm missing out because i've never had a classroom lesson in greek... :)

also there are some advantages about not learning in a classroom (of course there are advantages which everyone already knows...): many teachers, so i've read and heard, pronounce greek with a stress accent rather than the historically-correct pitch accent (this is only a problem if you care about the historical pronunciation though); accents are sometimes left untaught; the focus might be on "testable" aspects of greek, like translation into english and memorising morphology, which might stop you getting to a "reading" level of greek; having to do assessments at all might make learning greek painful, which it doesn't have to be at all.

i hope you give studying greek independently a go :)

Aurelia
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Post by Aurelia »

Okay now I'm confused. My (potential) sponsor wants us to send the check back and he'll give us a money order to pay for the class, but then my dad told me not to take money from him.

PS-I've started studying, I have 4 pages full of notes from textkit and I plan to learn Greek whether I take that class or not. :D

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