I’ve been studying Koine Greek for the past 3 to 4 years and feel like I’ve plateaued. If I were to devote 1 hour a day to the study of Koine. How would you break up that hour. for example, would you spend 10 minutes reviewing vocabulary, 15 on syntax another 10 composing and 25 minutes reading.
What would you suggest?
I would suggest spending nearly all of your time reading. Read the Greek without using a translation except as a last resort. Study vocabulary and syntax as you encounter new vocabulary (or old vocabulary that you’ve forgotten) and syntactic difficulties. Look up every word you don’t recognize in the dictionary, and make sure you know the grammatical form of every inflected word. Make sure you understand the syntax of every sentence you read. (Be prepared to recognize that in 2000-year-old texts there are necessarily going to be some passages whose meaning and syntactic analysis is disputed, and some passages that no one understands.) Equip yourself with a good commentaries that address linguistic, not just theological, issues. After three years you should have a handle on basic grammar and vocabulary. At this point, I recommend that you use reading to solidify your command of the language. Extensive reading, in my view, is the key to mastery of ancient languages (and modern ones, too, if you want to get beyond a basic competence).
You might also try reading some classical Attic prose texts to broaden your command of the language–Lysias, Plato, maybe even Demosthenes and other Attic orators.
I’m transitioning to the Schliemann method. Basically, you memorize a large chunk of text. More and more I think it is the only game in town for one hour a day. Of course if you were to be a full time classicist, then it would make sense to avail yourself of all kinds of secondary sources. But if your goal is to really get somewhere in a decade with only an hour a day, then reading aloud and memorizing is probably the way to go. I think one has to take very very very seriously the fact that people who know a dozen languages more or less all use this method. Imagine you live far from Russia and Russians. Now imagine you memorized 200 pages of Tolstoy. Lastly imagine what you would have to do with conventional methods to match the memorized Tolstoy.
I agree you should spend most of the time reading, I think there’s no doubt about that. Of course, I must slightly disagree on the particulars… 
I think you should read as much as you can so that you still understand everything. Commentaries, grammars, translations are necessary but they easily distract you from what’s really essential, i.e. the Greek itself. Ideally, choose a text that’s not too difficult for you, so you don’t have to look up everything and so you can get immerged into the Greek. When you look up the translation, go back to the Greek text and make sure you understand - I think it’s good to have a couple of different translations you can compare, so that you don’t get the wrong idea of what the Greek really means. I think reading aloud and memorising slow you down, and are thus against my principle of “as much as possible” - a better variation of that in my opinion is reading again a text you’ve already read.
Personnally, I finished reading the Agamemnon of Aeschylus recently, which I’m pretty proud about, since it was really really hard. Since then I’ve been reading a little Plato (Euthyphro and the Apology), which is much easier, I can read quite long sections without looking anything up if I don’t feel like it. For improving my Greek it’s much better than Aeschylus, because when I read without interruptions, I really get into the natural rhythm of the language. If in the same time I can read ten times more Plato than Aeschylus, I think it must be improving my Greek a lot more. I’ve pretty much decided now that I’m going to read a lot easier stuff like Plato before attacking difficult texts like tragedy again.
How many hours a day did you spend on Aeschylus?
I have no idea. I don’t work daily, I don’t have the time. It’s more like 5 hours now, 2 hours tomorrow, 4 hours next tuesday and 4 hours two weeks later.
I think you should read as much as you can so that you still understand everything.
This is very good advice (although, as in any ancient text, there will undoubtedly be some passages that no one really understands). You will have to work at understanding everything–and that’s where dictionaries and commentaries are extremely useful, in my opinion.
If you are focusing on Koine Greek, you will be reading a very limited corpus which you probably know in translation almost by heart. That should be a big advantage, although there’s risk that you will rely on your preconceived understanding of the meaning and not notice alternative interpretations of the Greek.
Again, your time would be best spent reading as much as possible.
I question the value of spending large amounts of time and mental effort on memorization, unless you’re equipped with a memory that makes memorization instantaneous and effortless. I think you will learn more Greek from simply reading and making sure you understand what you’ve read as thoroughly as possible. Memorizing 200 pages of Tolstoy won’t help you that much with contemporary Russian texts or even Dostoevsky. If you read lots of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and other texts, however, and make sure you understand as much as possible, you will internalize idioms and characteristic modes of expression.
I know from experience. I learned basic Russian–enough to internalize the grammatical forms and basic vocabulary–in a one-year full-time course in the Army, but I took the basic knowledge from that course to a higher level by reading War and Peace and Anna Karenina over the next two years. I didn’t rely on memorization, but nevertheless, by looking up every word I didn’t know in the dictionary, I greatly expanded my vocabulary and solidified my knowledge of grammar. When I turned to Dostoevsky, though, I still found it somewhat difficult because Dostoevsky’s vocabulary and especially his style are completely different from Tolstoy’s.
I would break the hour up thus: reading Greek 30 minutes, writing Greek 15 minutes, speaking Greek 10 minutes, listening to Greek 5 minutes, reading ABOUT Greek in English zero minutes. (This last bit is an exaggeration–you have to read SOME Greek grammar, but I would keep this to the bare minimum.)
Of course, you can listen to Greek while driving in the car, and you can speak Greek to yourself in the shower (προσκυνῶ τῷ Ἰησοῦ. ἄρα σὺ τῷ Ἰησοῦ προσκυνεῖς?) and you can write Greek during a staff meeting while you pretend to take notes. So, I would try to add writing, speaking and listening IN ADDITION to the hour, and spend an hour reading Greek and an hour doing the other three. That is one advantage of supplementing your reading with writing, listening and speaking; you can work these into your day without requiring the full undivided attention demanded of reading Greek texts.
We lack objective evidence PROVING that writing, listening to and speaking Ancient Greek will increase your reading fluency, because so few people have tried to do it, and we don’t have control groups. But we do know that the reading-only approach has not produced very good results.
I’m sympathetic to this suggestion, because, again, I think the status quo of grammar-translation is not working, but, for what it is worth, early on when I was learning Greek, I memorized the Lord’s Prayer in Greek and recited it several times a day for several months. You would think that this would have helped me internalize the forms, but, looking back, I don’t think it did much good. Maybe memorizing larger blocks of text would have been effective, or maybe different people learned differently, but for me this approach did not work. But, as FDR said about getting out of the Great Depression, “Try something. Try anything.”
Some people think you are better off reading a little really hard Greek versus reading a lot of easy Greek. I think you do need to do both. But I think a huge problem with the traditional way we learn Greek is that we do not read enough comprehensible input. Even Plato is way to hard to just sit down and read. This is another advantage to conversational written Greek, because the Greek produced this way is so easy that it goes directly into the brain without much parsing and analysis and looking things up. (This is even more the case in the Schole Greek Ancient Greek chat room.) I think it makes sense to read lots of adapted Greek like the early chapters of JACT and Paula Saffire’s book. I would also recommend that you try some of my “leveled” Readings of Biblical Texts:
http://discourse.textkit.com/t/more-leveled-readings-of-greek-texts/10997/1
And right now I am reading a simplified Anabasis
http://archive.org/stream/easyselectionsad00xenoiala#page/n5/mode/2up
which I cannot recommend enough.
Thanks for the replies, I didn’t expect so many replies in such a short time!
I havn’t really thought much of speaking it, writing it, and listening, that would really cement ideas in my brain much more solidly. As far as memorizing portions of text, I found that this has helped me to learn vocabulary, but did little with syntax in general. Are these the techniques that you use to learn greek Markos?
This is so true, I have found because I know the New Testament so well in english, that I have to proactively avoid the “automatic” english translation in my head (it would be good to get a septuagint or some writings from the early church fathers for this very reason"). One thing that is encouraging though, is occasionally, I’ll come to a word in Greek where I can’t think of the traditional gloss that is used for it, but still understand the meaning of the word! I’ve learned that when this happens, to stop looking for the english word, because its not needed! I suppose this is a sign of internalization
As far as reading, I read very regularly, and I reread often. I spent my last couple sessions of reading going over Chapter 7 in ΚΑΤΑ ΙΩΑΝΝΗΝ, I’ve probably read it 7 or 8 times before I felt comfortable moving on to Κεφ 8.
In summary, I will add writing, speaking and listening to my repertoire of greek tools. Anyone know of any good Greek audio? I prefer a modern προφορα but find Greeklatinaudio.org to quick to follow along.
hi, i think almost any of these activities would be great as long as they keep you engaged and learning. i say that because how i would spend an hour doing classics keeps changing. nowadays i will either pick up my joshua barnes iliad and just read , or write grk scholia and illustrations to grk texts or latin scholia and illustrations to latin texts, or memorise latin poetry the way i used to memorise grk poetry, or just grab e.g. cicero or quintilian off the shelf and start reading. in the past however i spent my time very differently, i had phases where i did grk iambic comp for hours a day and scoured through every metrical text i could find, at other times i read books on verb formation and accenting and studied patterns in concordances and read dictionaries (not all the way through but decent chunks) etc etc…
as long as you are learning then there’s no perfect balance of reading vs grammar etc. the way that people dispute the best ratios of protein to carbs for exercise – in classics it’s good to see as much as possible i think, i remember spending hours in libraries opening and flicking through hundreds of books and literally discovering whole new fields in classics to learn about… this variety may itself help with your plateau.
when it comes to composition/conversational however, i personally think it’s better to ground the exercise itself in real ancient texts rather than just freeform, where you might not know how far you are swerving from the path. for vocab acquisition, i write interlinear scholia in real texts rather than just freeform and looking new words up as i go. for syntax, when i used to spend time on this, i thought the best thing to do was find very literal translations of texts and then translate those translations back into the original language, and then check my version against the original and think about the differences.
if you want to do freeform however then i personally think verse comp is better than prose comp – verse comp has many rules to restrict you to a pattern resembling that used by the ancient poets, the smaller space you are left to work in means you have less risk of deviating from the model texts, and the exercise certainly makes reading verse much easier.
but there’s no single road to improving your classics skills and i’m sure later on i will have changed my mind again and be doing things differently. cheers, chad
I’m skeptical about the utility of listening to spoken Greek. Reconstructed pronunciation is a fascinating subject in itself, but few or none of the recordings I’ve come across are really satisfying. If reconstructed pronunciation interests you, go for it, but I don’t think it will help you much to understand Greek. This is different from living languages, where we know exactly what it should sound like, and where oral skills are usually essential.
My advice? Read, read, read!
I would like to clarify something, and of course run my mouth some more. 
I think that the goal for all of us, OP included, is to be able to eventually read the Greek with ease. So the question that I was addressing was how to get to that stage as quickly as possible with a one hour per day restriction. So my view is to memorize a large chunck of text (I think the standard is actually more like 500 pages). This gives the student a huge number of paradigmatic examples ready to hand. (They say classicists would claim to find errors in Schliemann’s prose, but he could immediately cite a passage with such a usage.) So, while the “read, read, read” camp sounds like they are having all the fun, don’t forget that the tortise beats the hare, and so we Schliemannites claim that we will be able to do more reading, reading, reading in the long run!
I don’t know about anyone else, but I would never have been able to memorize 500 pages of prose, even before senility set in. Some people may be gifted with the kind of memory that would allow them to achieve such a feat, but I certainly am not.
One activity that might be less time-consuming and more productive than memorizing a lot of text would be to spend time preparing a careful written translation of a substantial amount of text. You might even set as your goal your own translation of the entire NT.
Memorisation: Depends on memory, I have an exceptional one and in the beginning I used to memorise not whole passages but examples of usage from grammars, this could be a happy medium. However the exact same thing can be achieved by paying attention to what you read.
Grammar translation: I’m not sure how this is failing, its doing what it means to do rather well: Produce philologists with a firm grasp of the particulars of said language. OBVIOUSLY it needs to be supplemented by reading, if people go to class but then fail to read in their own time and therefore learn nothing that’s their problem. But anyway this is not the place for this.
Anyway I would suggest the following: Grammatical review, make sure you know all the salient points. Find someway to practice producing the syntax: either in a composition book or going back over a textbook or whatever. Then, here is the main thing, read. Yes make use of a translation if and when you must. Read extensively, you need to do this in order to prepare yourself for any deep reading. It will speed up rapidly.
hi, i think it’s clear to all of us that pster has already a great command of grammatical and syntactical points, given the threads that pster has started and contributed to, and so i would say go for it re memorising. it has definitely helped me (there are some rare words whose meaning i would never be able to remember without having memorised the slab of text in which i found them) and i’m sure it won’t stop pster working on the other aspects of classics.
on translation, i have what is i’m sure a very minority view. i don’t think translating into a modern language is doing classics, for me it’s doing modern languages. just as e.g. drawing a human body is not studying anatomy but is drawing, or depicting sounds of nature with the violin is not a study of natural science but an exercise in music. of course you need to understand so much of what you are drawing to be able to draw it, and similarly with translating grk or latin into modern language, but that doesn’t mean that it’s an exercise in anatomy rather than drawing. the benefits of learning about anatomy through drawing could be obtained by studying anatomy itself, and the downside may be – i say may be because i don’t know, but it’s definitely possible that these downsides exist – that you are missing parts in the original that cannot come across into the modern language and limiting your understanding of what is there into what can be depicted in the modern language. translation is useful i’m sure for people who study classics in a school or uni and need to be graded, but for someone like me on the outside who’s never been inside a classics schoolroom or lecture hall as student or teacher, i’ve always avoided translation, thinking that i can get the benefits from other studies and avoid any possible downsides (of which there may or may not be some, but in doubt i have opted for the more cautious approach.) when i think e.g. of how the spacing of the 2 elements of a compound verb can be used to set colometry length (see eg habinek on the colometry of latin style pgs 159 and 164: http://books.google.fr/books?id=48nDcNS2OycC&pg=PA159 ) or how the effect of metre is lost in translation, and 1,000 other aspects of the ancient language which fail to carry across into the modern, this does not prove that translation is worthless but it certainly pushes me to continue exercises on the language itself, rather than trying to depict its shadow in the form of a modern language. cheers, chad
Pster isn’t the OP though.
You do make an in interesting point with translation in a sense, we’re not trained to translate as in the olden days where people could produce wonderful English, French and what have you and I definitely can compose in either language better than translate out of it. But translating back and forth is a good way to check if you have the salient points down, forcing you to really think about it. I also remember a while back having trouble with Virgil. I could read it, parse it, understand it, but there wasn’t something I felt I didn’t quite get. I translated bks 3-6 and by the end of it I felt I had a much better grasp of his style and clearer mental processes from which I could utilise commentaries. Tedious? sort of and no one would ever pay to read my translation but I found it helped.
I do agree outside of a class room the hyper traditional methods aren’t going to necessarily work, from lack of time, materials and mentorship. Yet I think even those wanting more modern approaches ought to occasionally borrow from these methods since they are still useful. Also, believe it or not, there has been an updating of methodology in the last few decades.
The biggest problem here, for me, is that the OP is concerned strictly with the NT so I worry any advice I might give might be OTT for such a limited corpus. The only thing I’ve ever picked up from Biblical scholars teaching Greek is read Acts and Luke a lot in the beginning. But then I’m not a Christian, so…
ALSO JACT do a reader for the NT, its blue and about 200 pages and well made. Try that? Less dictionary time.
@ Qimmik: You have probably memorized 500 songs or poems. You can try memorizing the audio CDs that go with Agamemnon. I still have some verses rattling around in my head from the two weeks I spent on that.
@ Chad: It’s rare that I don’t deserve praise, but this is such an instance. My command of Attic grammar and syntax is poor. I can focus on an issue, but keeping all of it in view is another matter. And the vocabulary and the forms give me endless trouble. It is precisely because of this very deep rut that I am in that I am transitioning to the Schliemann method. I never would have started Greek if I had known how unrewarding it would all be. In fact, I may just declare victory and satisfy myself with the ability to decipher whatever random sentences of Greek I encounter.
@ All: N.B., professional translators translate into their native language. That seems to indicate something, but I just woke up, so I’ll leave it to you to draw conclusions.
I’m in my mid-50’s and have been ‘doing’ Koine since I studied NT Greek at University. I THOUGHT I was pretty good at it.
Then a couple of years ago, just as a hobby, I thought I’d try to learn Attic Greek. Quite simply, it turned my (Greek) world upside down. I suddenly realised that:
a) I wasn’t nearly as good at Greek as I thought, and
b) when I thought I was reading NT Koine, I was REALLY just using it as an aide-mémoire, because I already knew the English text pretty well.
I started seeing all kinds of deeper meanings to the NT words, and the text came alive in a totally new way.
I’m currently paddling on the shorelines of Herodotus and Homer, and enjoying it, but my first love is still Koine. If you don’t want to mess about with Attic, Homeric, etc, I’d still recommend digging out a few of the Hellenistic novels and working though them. It can be a real blast to find those familiar ‘religious’ NT words used in their earthy, day-to-day settings.
There’s some good stuff (and fun reading) in the Oxyrhinchus letters too.
I am at the same stage as you. The basic stuff, the article, common declensions is easy because every bit of Greek you read keeps reminding you of them. The hard stuff optative etc is not really hard its just you meet examples rarely so you tend to forget them in between times.
The big disadvantage of reading original Greek is that it throws at you a lot of new words and idioms and mixed in is the stuff you sort of half know but and individual form will only occur now and then. As you will be reading slowly it will be a time you encounter again a a bit you want to learn a second time. Hence it will probably help to go over again an again the sections you read rather than trying to read thru something.
Well designed textbooks should emphasize some target form in each section. Hence if you have completed one textbook it is worth while trying another as a slightly fresh approach will help consolidation. I find when going back to old exercises in a text book I have completed some while ago I have forgotten them so the exercises are almost as fresh as the first time.
On text books I can’t resist a plug for Polis Christophe Rico, It’s not perfect. A complete beginner would find it very hard (but you’re not). He emphasizes different things - hence the aorist imperative is covered in the second chapter. It is lively enough that it is easy to repeat the lessons. It is also in Koine.
Translation back into Greek forces you to really get to grips with the language. It is all too easy to wing it and get the gist without truly coming to grips with the Greek you are reading.
Remember the plateau is regarded as an illusion. Though on the surface you appear not to be progressing you are still consolidating what you do sort of know.
Little and often is better than a lot only occasionally. Hence, it is better to do something you enjoy than to try something that in theory is a good idea and risks you failing to keep up with your one hour a day.