Ok, I am starting to freak out a little over this. I'm on Mastronarde 17, I've done a unit a week, there are 42 total. Greek seems quite an order of magnitude harder, to the point where latin is feeling simple and easy, and a model of logic.
I am being thrown off by the morph. changes, of -εω verbs having their own little paradigm. It blows my mind that Mastronarde's own course he teaches blows through 3 units a WEEK! I am asking for this pain because I am trying to learn Latin and Attic at the same time (though with six month lead on Latin first). I can't imagine why my book is only an "INtroduction" to ATtic, and worse, the "Intensive Course" book I've seen on amazon, goes for 700 pages.
Is Attic Greek really so hard or is it just that I am learning it right now?
Can anyone tell me what is easier about Greek compared to Latin? That would help me.
I also seem to forget the definitions I learn. I keep forgetting the precise meanings that can be included with prepositions, such as προς depending on the +DAT, +GEN, or +ACC, no matter how many times I do flashcards. I now have difficulty understanding verb conjugations with the imperfect that is added in U16 of Mastronarde, and that is just one tense beyond perfect. How can I ever read this stuff? I am able to translate the examples Mastronarde has at the end of the units, but I have to parse it and look up word after word, as one of the difficult things about these ancient languages seems to be that you have to remember a lot for each word, (not just meaning but gender, middle/passive meaning, whether it is deponent) and if you mess up one word being read, it throws off your whole understanding because of the inflection system.
And if Greek makes Latin look easy, Latin makes Spanish look easy. Spanish is like Child's play compared to these weighty idioms.
I feel like i'm 'falling behind' even though I've kept to my schedule. Maybe I made a mistake and should have concentrated on Latin for another full year before trying Greek. My long term aim is to simply work on the languages, about 6 days a week, reading a certain amount by habit, and overtime be able to read proficiently, but I'm starting to doubt this will ever happen. I think latin has prepared me fairly well Grammatically for Greek, but the problem is remebering all the Greek forms and vocabulary, if I had a perfect memory I could breeze through it, but I just can't remember this much.
Maybe one of the problems is that I use flashcardexchange (Leitner system), which doesn't have an option, as Anki does, for cards to be recalled sooner than others. (I can't install Anki at work, and that is when I do flashcards sometimes, on break of course). Flashcards don't seem to be helping me much, I forget many of them by the time they come back up for review.