χaῖρετε / salvēte!
I have been studying Greek with an excellent tutor here in NYC for 3 years now (he is a graduate of the “greats” program at Oxford, how lucky am I?) and have recently been working on Latin too (I maintain they’re the same language just the words are different.
). Its twice the work, but also twice the fun.
In Greek we first worked through Mastronarde’s textbook (took about a year), and since then have read all kinds of stuff from Homer on down, my special interest being philosophy so various sections of Plato and Aristotle, but a little of this and a little of that generally. Currently reading the part of book VII of Herodotus about Leonidas and the 300.
Latin is SO much easier than Greek! especially the verbal system, but its also easier because english is basically a romance language with some anglo-saxon thrown in (and a few Greek words too!), so its very easy to relate to Latin. Greek just seems more foreign, the way they express their thoughts etc. but Greek wins as far as fineness of expression and, or course, the quality of the corpus.
To get up to speed in Latin, I’m working through Jones & Sidwell “Reading Latin” (which is what they use at Oxford), Lingua Latina I, and the “Cursus Linguae Latinae Vivae” of Fr. Siedl, the 26 CDs of which are great to listen to while walking the dog, etc (as is Ørberg’s recording of LL). Actually, before I even started those, the first thing I did was hack through the first couple of pages of Lucretius, and was quite surprised that it was manageable just on the strength of my knowledge and Greek and, of course, a lot of help from Perseus!
Anyway, looking forward to maybe almost being ready to contribute to this forum!
PS if anyone is looking for a great tutor in NYC, PM me and I will hook you up!