Any tips for self study?

Greek Learning Greek
21

i don’t think translating into a modern language is doing classics, for me it’s doing modern languages. . . . you are missing parts in the original that cannot come across into the modern language

The idea is to try to understand the original thoroughly and to attempt to capture as much of the original as you can in the translation.

You have probably memorized 500 songs or poems.

I probably haven’t, but in any case, songs and poems are much, much easier to memorize than prose. Metrical form, rhyme (in the case of modern European languages), unusual use of language, and, in the case of songs, melody make memorization easier. In Greek, as a matter of fact, poetic texts are earlier than the earliest prose texts–poetry was invented, I think, precisely for the transmission by memory of large chunks of information in non-literate societies.

But 500 pages of prose? No way.

And excessive memorization is dangerous. Scroll down to p. 49:

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=Twa2Tom.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=4&division=div1

And Schliemann isn’t always the most reliable source of information, especially when his own accomplishments are in question.

22

Sorry guys, I havn’t forgotten about the post, I’m heading out for work, but will comment when I get home.

23

Thanks for all the replies, I’ve read them all :slight_smile: Sounds like continued reading is a common theme. Certainly can’t go wrong. My corpus is mainly NT, however, I’d like to expand a little with some of the early writings as well as the LXX. I’d toyed with the idea of learning an earlier dialect and reading through the Iliad, but I’m a little hesitant. Either way. I’ve started going through the gospel of John… Easy Greek to keep me motivated… and I’m moving really slow and methodically. So far with this approach, I seemed to have gained a few vocabulary words that I would have glossed over, although I’m finding the syntax often a bit challenging. I suppose “Make haste slowly” seems to be working.

24

I’ve done quite a bit of this, using notecards. On one side I copy an Ancient Greek text. On the other side I write out a literal translation that follows the Greek word order and has cues on which constructions to use. Then I try to reproduce the Greek text exactly, and then I flip the card over to check my work. I also use the English as a cue to speak the Ancient Greek. I record the Greek myself and listen to it over and over again.

I have no doubt that this is very effective, and I would recommend it to Uberdwayne as part of my advice to write (and speak and listen to) as well to read, Ancient Greek. But the problem with this method (or the traditional comp textbooks) is 1. it’s tedious, writing conversational Greek is more fun and easier to motivate oneself to do. 2. these methods still use English, and they wind up reinforcing English glosses for the Greek, and I think at some point it makes sense to transition to a Greek-only learning environment.

25

Im not sure I understand what you mean by this. Can you elaborate on this?

26

I just mean that I use the over-literal translation to reproduce the Greek text not only in writing, but in speaking it out loud. This is essentially the Assimil Method. It involves active writing and speaking, but this is more “guided” than free-from writing or speaking. Purists will like it because you wind up (re)producing actual Greek texts. I just don’t like going through English if I can avoid it.

It would be better if you could use pictures as a cue to reproduce Greek, but this would only work with very simple sentences.

27

Markos, why don’t you try reading the Anabasis in the unaltered form in which X wrote it? It’s really not very difficult, and wrestling with the difficulties it does present should contribute to your mastery of the language–when you turn to more complicated texts you will have to face those difficulties and more. You can find plenty of cheap older second-hand editions with commentaries, some even with vocabularies, as this was the first text that students broached after going through the grammar for a semester when Greek was taught in secondary school. Won’t it be more productive for you to engage with the actual text than with a simplified version produced at a time when boys (and almost exclusively boys) started learning Greek around age 9 or 10? You undoubtedly bring much more background to the text than Victorian-era kids of that age.

On comparison of the simplified version with the original, the simplified version reads like the sentences of made-up Greek that are found in elementary text-books. It looks to me like many of the characteristic idioms and modes of expression of real Greek–which you will need to master in order eventually to read real Greek (if that’s your goal)–have been smoothed out to produce a text that reads almost like a word for word translation from English. In particular, the word-word order has been shifted around, and all the particles seem to have been reduced to men and de.

I think you can handle the real thing.

28

The choice is between reading a larger quantity of simplified Greek and rather small portion of real Greek.
Adapted text allows you to read of lot of stuff you sort of know and by the repetition allows that to become second nature. Reading harder stuff means you can spend a day struggling over a sentence and having sussed it out it will days before you meet the forms that gave you the trouble again. By that time you will have forgotten them.

Difficult Greek has the price that you read less Greek - that’s the key problem.

But like Markos I do read actual Greek - there is an argument for doing both.

29

Difficult Greek has the price that you read less Greek - that’s the key problem.

The Anabasis is very easy Greek, and the _un_simplified school editions, which are aimed at less advanced readers, typically provide enough help that those readers won’t have to spend an excessive amount of time puzzling over difficulties. But it’s more productive, in my view, to spend a little more time confronting real Greek and working out difficulties–which you will have to do eventually if your aim is to progress beyond the Anabasis to Plato, Thucydides or Demosthenes–than to breeze through Greek that has been reconfigured to read more like English.

30

Interesting, I can sort of see the advantage of using more made up Greek in terms of reinforcing basic grammatical/syntactical constructions and solidifying vocabulary but I think you very quickly get to a plateau. Especially since the only way to get good at reading Greek is to read Greek. I remember the first time reading a tragedy, I wanted to kill someone but you get used to it rapidly. I still don’t love tragedy besides Eurip. Orestes but…

It’s worth mentioning that there are several really good student editions nowadays too. At the more expensive end are the Cambridge Green and Yellows produced for upper forms in schools/early undergraduate years which usually offer a wealth of information. Some like Mastronade’s Medea probably a bit too much grammatical help and is so rather thick. Besides that you have Steadman and Nimis and Hayes, the JACT readers etc which are really great in the early stages.

I think the thing is people don’t really read in blocks, which is how we tackle Classical literature: Homer is so much easier when put together with Hesiod and Herodotos, I found most of Tacitus’ very easy since I’d read so much of Caesar, Sallust and Livy etc etc. Its a matter of developing reading practices.

Anyway I just think “real” texts are easier in the long term but its best to use a mix of materials.

31

Hmm… Because of the Greek, or because of the subject matter…? :slight_smile:

I think the thing is people don’t really read in blocks, which is how we tackle Classical literature: Homer is so much easier when put together with Hesiod and Herodotos, I found most of Tacitus’ very easy since I’d read so much of Caesar, Sallust and Livy etc etc. Its a matter of developing reading practices.

Anyway I just think “real” texts are easier in the long term but its best to use a mix of materials.

You mean like “read one book of Homer, then the Theogony, then another book of Homer, then a bit of Herodotus, then five books of Homer…”. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me. Though it’s helpful to have a good teacher to make a reading schedule for you, because it’s difficult to know this sort of thing before you’ve actually read the text yourself.

32

Qimmik: You’ve convinced me to read the Anabasis ASAP.

33

What I see as good simplified Greek is something written using only a limited number of grammatical forms and a limited vocabulary. The aim being not simply to make it simpler but to ensure that by repetition those forms etc get fully learnt.

Make the Greek less Greek by making it more like the readers own first language is definitely what I have in mind and I agree that kind of adaption is a mistake.

34

Paul, if you’re reading Homer and you’ve made your way through the Agamemnon, you don’t need to read the Anabasis to improve your Greek. And while parts of it are interesting, much of it isn’t. If you want to read it, get an abridged edition (not a simplified edition), and read the selections. If you learn nothing else from the Anabasis, you will learn this Greek verb:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3De)celau%2Fnw

If you want to read something to improve your Greek, I would suggest reading Lysias or Demosthenes.

Lysias is probably the next level up from the Anabasis, and it’s a substantial but not impossible leap. The speeches are generally written in a very clear style, but they’re more demanding, in my view, than the Anabasis. They also offer a window into the Athenian judicial system as well as into Athenian life around the end of the fifth century and the beginning of the fourth–the era of Socrates and Plato–and the way the Athenian “man on the street” thought.

Lysias was a metic–a resident alien–in Athens, whose considerable family fortunes were ruined when the Spartans defeated Athens and who was forced to make his living as a logographos, a professional speech-writer for litigants to deliver in court cases. The Athenians didn’t allow legal professionals–lawyers and judges–so litigants had to conduct their own cases in front of a jury of several hundred Athenian jurors. (Jury duty was paid and it was a form of welfare for poor people.) So if one party to a dispute wanted to pursue litigation beyond the mandatory arbitration level–if they weren’t satisfied with the decision of the arbitrators–both parties had to get up in front of the jury and deliver speeches. If you weren’t confident of your forensic abilities, you would pay for a logographos like Lysias to write a speech for you, and you would memorize it for delivery before the jury. The speeches of Lysias (and a few others “Attic orators”) were preserved as models of the purest Attic Greek for young Greek students for almost two and a half millenia (but it’s not clear which, if any, speeches of the corpus attributed to Lysias were actually written by him).

Again, helpful commentaries are available, both older ones in reprint or second-hand and one in the Cambridge Greek and Latin (green and yellow) series. The older commentaries are serviceable and cheaper, but the Cambridge commentary by Carey (I think–the editor of the new OCT Lysias) provides more up-to-date background information, which will be very useful as you read other Greek authors.

35

Sort of both, I’ve always disliked Tragedy. From a scholarly perspective we have very little of the good ones anyway, what we have is due to luck or Roman/Byzantine interests so I find them sort of…bleh. Also the kind of analysis one sees strikes me as facile and idiotic. Basically the plays themselves often bore me as does the resultant scholarship. Oddly enough though Tragedy did become a very important source for me, which sucked.

So yeah like I mentioned we were thrown into Tragedy very early, like second term, because first year Greek was a bloody democracy apparently and apparently we just must read Euripides. :unamused: Like I said earlier though, I do love his Orestes and Aeschylus on the whole is nice too. Actually I think a lot of my dislike of Tragedy is really just dislike of Euripides.

As for the Greek, it was annoying at first until I developed a feel for the register and metre in which case it became easier. But I’ve never really enjoyed myself with Tragedy the way I have Comedy. That’s another thing: Aristophane’s Clouds is approachable by anyone with a term or two of Greek.

You mean like “read one book of Homer, then the Theogony, then another book of Homer, then a bit of Herodotus, then five books of Homer…”. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me. Though it’s helpful to have a good teacher to make a reading schedule for you, because it’s difficult to know this sort of thing before you’ve actually read the text yourself.

Yeah essentially in blocks, its important that you cover a variety of differing but related styles and so in general ease your way in. I agree its hard to guess without a teacher, actually even most teachers will just give you a list and tell you to get through it.

Xenophon: Always traditionally been an introduction to Greek prose. I personally think he can be shunted aside in favour of Herodotos if you’re after Epic quickly, but its still good for your Greek. Actually the Anabasis is a wonderful piece of evidence for Greek social organisation and rhetoric.

Forensic Speeches: There is also a commentary by Carey and Reid on selected speeches of Demosthenes, definitely worth it. Carey is one of the leading experts on the Athenian lawcourts btw, unlike say Rubenstein or Todd etc he is more literary rather than epigraphically focused which makes his work really interesting.

36

Daivid’s response said pretty much everything I would say in defense of adapted Greek. But just as a point of clarification, I am more than capable of reading unadapted Xenophon, and have in fact read quite a bit him, though he is not one of my favorite authors. For that matter, right now I AM re-reading the unadapted Anabasis in conjunction with the adapted edition of Phillpotts and Jerram, because I am very interested in the process of how best to adapt or “level” Ancient Greek, something I have done quite a bit of myself. My Greek is good enough that I routinely read authors more difficult than Xenophon without any helps at all.

I can’t prove it, but I feel in my bones that my Greek would not be as good as it is if I had never read (or written!) any adapted (or conversational) Greek and did nothing but read “real” Greek using the traditional methods of grammar-translation. For Greek learners at any level–and much more so for beginners–at least SOME of one’s reading and listening should be what Stephen Krashen calls “comprehensible input.” Ironically, the closest “real” Greek we have to this is probably the LXX, which is influenced, not by English but by Hebrew (which tends to be closer to English than Greek in word order, simple syntax, lack of particles etc) and is therefore easier Greek for the type of rapid internalization of forms that some of us seek in reading and listening to adapted Greek.

37

Qimmik and Scribo, thanks for your tips. My background in Greek is that I’ve read a lot of poetry, mostly hexameter, but little Attic. A couple of plays by Aristophanes and the Agamemnon and very little Plato is about all I’ve read in Attic. If a word of what you’re saying is true, Xenophon is the closest thing there is to something that reads like a modern book, without constantly looking everything up. Doubtless I can manage something quite a bit more difficult, but I think it would be rewarding to read something really easy for a change after all these years. It’s a psychological thing I guess.

One reason I write on this forum is to keep up and/or improve my English. I guess the time would be better spent with James Joyce’s Ulysses… :wink: