Schoder/Horrigan vs. Pharr

[charleshardt]

Can anybody enlighten me concerning the differences between learning Greek (from zero) with Schoder/Horrigan versus Pharr? I worked through 30 chapters of Pharr a few years ago, and I'm starting again. However, I just learned of the 3 volume Schoder/Horrigan series. There were raving reviews of it at Amazon, but they were primarily comparing it to Athanaze, not Pharr.

My objective is to read Homer and, later on, Plato. Side interests are Plutarch and the New Testament. I have about 6 hours a week to study. I would assume it would take about 3 or 4 years at this rate to get through the Iliad (or the Odyssey if I go with Schoder).

[Markos]

They are really pretty similar. They are both good. Shoder/Horrigan is a little more comprehensive, with more explanations and exercises. Pharr's choice of Iliad Book One is hard to beat, though S/H selections are also good. I cannot imagine any one who is serious about learning Homer not working through both books plus Frank Beetham's Beginning Greek with Homer. It really does not matter which you do first.

I would think if you just focus on Homer at six hours a week you should be able to get through all of Homer in two years.

Best wishes in your efforts.

[charleshardt]

Thanks, Markos. Then I will continue with Pharr and tackle Schoder/Horrigan next.

I would think if you just focus on Homer at six hours a week you should be able to get through all of Homer in two years.

Really? You mean, read through both the entire Iliad and Odyssey in a couple years? That's a better prospect than I imagined.

[modus.irrealis]

One nice thing about Homer is that once you get past poetic license and the almost bewildering variation in the declensions and conjugations, the sentences he uses are actually pretty simple and straightforward. It's not like, say, Thucydides, where half the trouble (or perhaps fun for some people) is figuring out how all the parts of a paragraph-long sentence fit together. My experience with Homer has been that after slogging through the beginning, you'll hit your stride and suddenly read whole bunches of lines without running into trouble (it also helps, of course, that a lot of the lines are constantly repeated ).

[Imber Ranae]

One other nice thing about Homer, or rather I should say Epic, is that the declensions, though one does have to be cognizant of several variants in their case-endings, are in many ways more recognizable than in Attic. The 3rd declension in particular has more readily identifiable case endings, since Epic lacks many of the contractions standard to Attic which obscure the original 3rd declension paradigm.

V [x]
N -ς/[x]
G -ος
D -ι
A -α/-ιν/[x]

V -ες/-α
N -ες/-α
G -ων
D -εσι(ν)/-εσσι(ν)/-σι(ν)
A -aς/-α


E.g. compare Attic βασιλεύς:

V βασιλεῦ
N βασιλεύς
G βασιλέως
D βασιλεῖ
A βασιλέᾱ

V βασιλῆς
N βασιλῆς
G βασιλέων
D βασιλεῦσι(ν)
A βασιλέᾱς

...with Homeric βασιλεύς:

V βασιλεῦ
N βασιλεύς
G βασιλῆος
D βασιλῆι
A βασιλῆα

V βασιλῆες
N βασιλῆες
G βασιλήων
D βασιλεῦσι(ν)
A βασιλῆaς

[fordprefect]

I have to say the major advantage I found to using Shoder&Horrigan over Pharr is every lesson is fairly self-contained, so you don't spend as much time searching the book for needed information. I want to say Pharr crams more information in, and is slightly more in depth, but I found the constant need to flip though to the back of the book tedious.

You might try them both and see which style you prefer.

[edonnelly]

I would think if you just focus on Homer at six hours a week you should be able to get through all of Homer in two years.

Really? You mean, read through both the entire Iliad and Odyssey in a couple years? That's a better prospect than I imagined.

I'm just going to say that I think that's way overly optimistic. We've had a lot of groups here on textkit work through Pharr. The typical schedule is one chapter a week (two a week very early on, but breaks needed here and there for holidays, so it averaged out). Maybe we weren't putting quite six hours a week in, but close to that (especially during the first year or so when there are still English->Greek exercises). Doing that schedule gets you through Pharr, and book 1 of the Iliad, in about a year and a half. And believe me, after Pharr it's still very slow-going. Some of the other Pharrists might have opinions on this as well.