Beginner Greek textbooks: early impressions

Greek Learning Greek
1

I began studying ancient Greek nearly three weeks ago, and was immediately confronted with its complexity. I don’t mean the complexity of the language (yet) - but the complexity of designing a self-study programme!

When I was studying Latin, the LLPSI ecosystem provided a (more or less) self-sufficient learning path. But Greek is a whole jumble of textbooks and grammars, and everyone has a different opinion on what works best. I felt like I had to learn Greek in order to figure out which textbook to learn Greek from! Which dialect should I start with (Attic, Koine, Homeric), which methodology (grammar-translation, inductive, something else), how important is it for my primary text to come with doodads like audio recordings and answer keys and extra exercises…

After scratching my head for a few days, I decided to plunge in blind. Pick some well-reviewed textbook, use it for a while, perhaps try another textbook, do a bit of this and that - with the hope that a working system that suits my study style would eventually emerge.

Below is a summary of the journey I’ve taken, as well as mini-reviews of the texts I’ve tried in the process - reviews from the perspective of a complete beginner and autodidact.

I hope this account is useful or at least entertaining, and I’m always happy for advice on adjusting my study programme! :smiley:

My journey

My first textbook choice was Athenaze, because I had heard that it was most similar to LLPSI, which I loved. The stories were indeed very readable and often amusing, but I soon found that Athenaze was insufficient on its own. I was half-learning many things, but not fully digesting them, and the further I got along the chapters, the more different words and paradigms started to merge together in my head. This is the danger of “comprehensible input” reading material like Athenaze: you can read page after page, making reasonable (and usually correct) guesses about the meaning of the story, thus thinking you understand it - when you had not absorbed the underlying grammar. This was starting to happen with me. I shouldn’t fault the book for this; if I had put more energy into doing the exercises, memorised the vocab and the paradigms more thoroughly, I would not be guessing my way through the text. But the deliberately approachable style of this text can lull a less-than-alert student into complacence. I felt that I needed a more solid grammar foundation, and a sterner textbook that wouldn’t let me guess at things.

So I soon began supplementing with Zuntz. This book gave me the additional grammar instruction I felt I needed, and I was also delighted by its wonderful selection of real (sometimes adapted) quotes from ancient authors. I recognised, read and understood excerpts from Socratic dialogues, even a line of poetry here and there. Where Athenaze took a deliberately lighthearted manner, Zuntz made me feel like a real scholar reading serious Greek, even though I was only days into learning the language. This gave me oodles of motivation to keep studying. The passages were not written to be easy reading; the syntax was often alien enough to me that I had to squint at every word ending, and mentally rearrange words in the sentence, sometimes translating parts of the Greek into Latin or English, before I could understand it. I loved this challenge - but when I got stuck, I was hopelessly stuck, as Zuntz is such an obscure text that there’s not even an answer key on the internet. I would get stuck several times at each lesson. Learning with Zuntz was living life on the edge, and eventually I burned out.

What to do? I was tempted to start a third textbook, a traditional grammar-drill-heavy one. I considered trying a big name one like Mastronarde or Hansen & Quinn, and I actually did try a few chapters of the Greek Ollendorff, but I know my temperament. I find drill-heavy books dreadfully boring, and when I’m bored, knowledge just doesn’t stick in my head. So, I need a text that is intrinsically interesting and therefore motivating, but also explicitly drills grammar, and is also popular enough that people have developed other resources for it.

That search led me to pick up Pharr’s Homeric Greek. It was with some hesitation that I hopped from Attic to Homeric Greek, thinking that my 2+ weeks of Attic Greek study would have been wasted. But that fear turned out to be unfounded. The early chapters of Pharr are virtually identical in grammar presentation to Athenaze and Zuntz - the few exceptions are easy to spot and easier to remember. In fact, the foundation I built with Athenaze+Zuntz allowed me to hurtle through 9 chapters of Pharr in one morning. Even though this book is translation-drill-heavy, I haven’t been bored yet. Because the book is directly based on the Iliad, the content has a feeling of grandeur about it. Being based off a single text also gives it some unity in its content - which helps me remember things, compared to Zuntz’s scattered quotation style. Supplementary resources abound, from an unofficial answer key, to two (separate) lengthy and free online video courses, premade flashcards - and of course, the Iliad itself has no shortage of student aids. Also, reading Homer makes me feel like a boss.

Will I settle on Pharr as my primary text? No idea yet. I suspect I’ll continue branching out and supplementing with other texts as I go - that’s my personality. I like to use a combination of various textbooks, graded readers, and exercises, so that what I read in one text can serve as revision and reinforcement of what I’ve already learned in another. It saves me from repeating the same lesson in the same textbook over and over to drum things into my head. Perhaps I’ll even work with Pharr and Zuntz together, side by side, because I really love Zuntz and don’t want to abandon it. (Is it a terrible idea to learn Homeric and Attic Greek at the same time? :open_mouth: )

Mini-review: Athenaze
Reached: Vol 1 Chapter 11 (out of 30 chapters over 2 volumes). (Noting which chapter I’ve reached, so you know what my review covers.)

Very fun and readable, but “the worst of both worlds” in terms of methodology: the text isn’t thorough enough for inductive learning, and the drills aren’t thorough enough for traditional grammar work.

Pros:

  • the stories are fun and highly readable
  • this text is very much in vogue, so there are plenty of unofficial tutorials, audio, and other resources on the internet
  • presents a smorgasbord of morphology early - e.g. 1/3rd into the series, I had already started learning the middle voice, participles, deponent verbs, and contract verbs

Cons:

  • unlike LLPSI, the text isn’t quite shaped well enough for me to unconsciously ingest language as I read - it’s not quite there for inductive style learning
  • the text is made-up Greek, and not intrinsically valuable - that is, it’s not the sort of stuff I would study and admire for its own sake, which diminishes my motivation to study the reading very closely
  • the “real Greek” snippets at the end of each chapter are poorly chosen - they contain so many unknown words that virtually every word has to be glossed, so that the gloss ends up being almost a translation of the text!

Key supplementary resources: the official workbook, official teacher’s guide, unofficial audio recordings (I use the ones by Luke Ranieri), Italian edition with rewritten/augmented text

Mini-review: Zuntz
Reached: Lesson 18 (out of 86 lessons)

Would be an excellent text, but lack of supplementary resources makes it hard to use for an autodidact.

Pros:

  • delectable selection of reading passages from a range of classical and post-classical authors - makes me feel like I’m reading “real Greek” from the start
  • explanations that regular make comparisons to Latin, and explains differences wrt Proto-Indo-Euro - placing unfamiliar grammar into familiar context, which helps me remember them (and is also fascinating!)
  • texts are challenging and require real mastery of the grammar taught - you cannot guess your way through them
  • presents less altered (i.e. less Anglicised) syntax, which I expect will help me bridge the comprehension gap between textbook Greek and real-world Greek

Cons:

  • long a, i, u are not marked - massive problem for me, as it (1) ruins my attempt at reconstructed classical pronunciation, and (2) makes accentuation more difficult to learn (I found this especially problematic when working through the lessons on the a-declension - the book kept telling me this -a is long, that -a is short… but they are printed identically!)
  • rather obscure text, so there are few other resources available. no answer key, no audio, hardly anyone on the internet talking about it - make it very difficult to use without a teacher

Key supplementary resources: none! (does anyone know of resources designed to work with Zuntz?)

Mini-review: Pharr
Reached: Lesson 9 (out of 77 lessons)

I’ve only used this for one day, so this is a super-earlybird impression reivew.

Pros:

  • unified and intrinsically interesting content (based on the Iliad)
  • layout sets all the vocab and exercises in the first half of the book, and grammar in the second half. My opinion is that this is superior to mushing everything together like most modern textbooks do. I used a PDF splitter tool to turn the two halves of the book into separate files, so I could reference them side by side

Cons:

  • no connected reading until you get to the Iliad in lesson 13; less reading content than Athenaze or Zuntz or other “reading-heavy” works

Key supplementary resources: Walter Roberts’ extensive video series teaching Pharr lesson by lesson; the HGR site also with extensive video/audio lessons, exercises and flashcards; recordings of the Iliad (I’ve been using David Chamberlain’s audio)

2

Thanks for sharing your well-packed 3 week journey.
I started learning AG on the same day I joined this forum (Nov 7th), so just over a week ago.
I’m making my way through John Taylor’s course ‘Greek to GCSE Pt 1 and 2’. Just finished Ch1 but need to memorise words (41 in checklist) and practise composing short sentences.

Right now, I’ve decided against using flash-cards. Instead, I fold my notepage in half and write out AG on left-side, English on right.

Recommended was the Attic Greek site with its revised tutorials, by Donald Mastronarde. I found this useful for word recognition and pronunciation. So, I’ve ordered Mastronarde’s book ’ Introduction to Attic Greek’.

Also, to increase understanding, another member’s recommendation: ‘World of Athens: An Introduction to Classical Athenian Culture’ - JACT.

I did find but have misplaced a one-off YouTube ‘tutorial’ of someone chanting a verb in present tense. A bit like the ‘amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant’ - a Latin class earworm, a century ago.

This is what I could do with, a teacher with whip in hand :slight_smile:
Advice to self:
No more buying of books…just apply a bit of effort to the basics.

Taylor’s Ch 1 and 2 supply this, then Ch 3 introduces small chunks of text:
‘How the Locracians make laws’ and ‘Athenian Wit’
Can hardly wait… :open_mouth:

Best wishes.

3

If you do M’s exercises, you’ll find the answer key helpful. It’s available on Amazon, and perhaps elsewhere.

4

So another book to buy ?!
It is a pity that ‘answer keys’ are separated from original text book exercises.
Understandable I suppose in some ways; the extra pages and cost…

Obtaining the answer keys to Taylor’s ‘Greek to GCSE Pt and 2’ meant registering with Bloomsbury Publishing and submitting a request for ‘instructor content’. This I did as an ‘Independent’ and received the links when request approved. No payment required.

Is there not a similar process for Mastronarde ?
It seems unfair to have to splash out for something that should be part of the course.

As for doing the exercises, yes, I hope to be able to use M’s book for a deeper reinforcement and understanding of the basics. Having read some threads regarding problems with the ‘answers’, it’s clear that time spent building a solid foundation is well spent.

As Loiesun points out in the OP:
‘…if I had put more energy into doing the exercises, memorised the vocab and the paradigms more thoroughly…’

My memory used to be fantastic, given early days rote learning methods.
Now, it’s pretty poor and needs to be exercised or re-trained.
It’s gonna take time…patience and time…to do it right…

5

Thanks very much for sharing your experience.

I wouldn’t describe Athenaze as “comprehensible input”. There is a lot of grammar even if it is “introduced in small doses”. Perhaps your difficulties arose because you treated it in this way?

I think its really hard (impossible?) to make progress on any course if you don’t assiduously try the exercises, learn the vocabulary and grammar. The separate workbook for Athenaze should not be regarded as an optional extra but a necessity.

I take issue with your complaint often heard on these boards that “the text is made-up Greek” and “not intrinsically valuable”. The value of the Athenaze text is that it will get you to where you want to go, reading texts which you admire. It’s a means to an end. The Greek itself seems to me to be perfectly good, written by people who know Greek very well.

Pharr is a controversial text on these boards although it has many admirers. But I think Pharr challenges what your idea of “made up Greek” is. Rearranging the words from the first few lines of Iliad to form practice sentences seems to me the acme of “made up Greek” and a terrible idea.

When you use any textbook there should be “no guessing” what a sentence means. You have to discipline yourself to ensure that you can answer any question about the morphology of the words in the sentence, then you need to ask yourself how the syntax works. Only when you have done this should you ever think about translating something. If you get into the habit of thinking this way there is no need to vaguely understand something. As you progress you will perhaps not need to actively analyse every word in a sentence but if you get stuck on how the syntax works you have a method to fall back on.

The key to learning any language is to take it in reasonable chunks and to work regularly at it.

Festina lente!

6

There are a great many people that pick up enough Greek that they can play pretend (to themselves or others) with classical texts (with plenty of references to the dictionary and translations). And that’s fine if that’s what you want. But if you want to read, well…

I’ve read a great deal of good Greek and made-up Greek. As I’ve gotten to the point, only in the last couple years, where I’ve got enough Greek to, say, read through a play I know nothing about and understand most of the lines without commentary or dictionary, or the same with a book of Homer, or whatever, I’ve found that meaning-guessing turned out to be by far the most important use of my study time. The most dangerous time-wasters were anything that involved taking expressions as a set of components rather than sentences as a whole. Ie., a lot of textbooks. The results in the students that come out of classical language programs are evidence enough for how well they work.

Anyway, this sentence-focus is also Gouin’s advice in “The art of teaching and studying languages,” which I read for the first time recently. I really hesitate to recommend it, because it’s eccentric and much of the advice obviously unreliable…but there are some gems in there. I’ve been trying to implement one piece of his system (radically altered for my purposes, of course) to gain some expressive fluency, which is still extremely subpar for me (ask bedwere): Whenever I read something, I take out the verbs, and express everything as a set of simple present tense sentences (from memory) with those verbs. Once I can fluently express things at that level, I repeat, adding the flavor and “relative language” (Gouin’s term) back into things.

7

The most important thing is to interact as much with the language as you can. I have students who love grammar, and others who respond extremely well to CI and TPRS. I have therefore adopted a more blended approach using a combination of these elements and it’s been working very well, as it stretches students in all directions. And poor me “raised” in the grammar-translation approach, when that’s all there was… :frowning:

8

I too had wanted to go flashcard-less. I find it hard to learn and remember decontextualised vocabulary, and would much prefer to learn vocabulary through large amounts of comprehensible input reading, which provides spaced repetition in a more natural manner and places vocabulary in sentence/meaning context.

But I increasingly realised that there’s not much beginner-level CI material in Greek - not nearly enough to let me naturally absorb vocabulary. So I bit the bullet about a week ago and started using Anki flashcards. I guess I’ll find out in the next few weeks how successful this is!

I found Mastronade’s tutorial on accentuation the only one that actually helped me learn accents. Other tutorials gave me lists of arcane rules on where accents go (unfortunately Pharr is one of these). But Mastronarde explained contonation as an overarching concept that helped many of those rules make sense.

I haven’t yet looked at his other tutorials, but will do so!

There are actually a number of very comprehensive grammar tutorial series on Youtube:

  • Amy Cohen from PlayGreek has a full series based on Hansen & Quinn (which includes the paradigm chants)
  • Leonard Muellner from Center for Hellenic Studies has another H&Q-based series
  • Walter Robert’s series based on Pharr

I’m sure there are others I have yet to discover.

Best wishes to your study too. I’d be interested to hear how useful you’ve found your own textbook combination!

9

Yes, you hit it on the nail - I had approached Athenaze like it was CI when it really wasn’t. I got a bit deceived by the first couple of chapters, which were paced very gently, and by internet comments that Athenaze is sort of like LLPSI but for Greek.

If I return to this textbook, I will need to rethink my approach from scratch, including (probably) far more grammar drilling.

I may have written too harshly and given the impression that I dislike textbook language, which is not the case at all. (As mentioned - I used LLPSI to learn Latin, which is of course made-up Latin, and I love that textbook.) I’m not a purist about what texts I read, and I’m also aware that at the early learning stages, a lot of my input necessarily has to be made-up language as opposed to real-world language.

Where I get more picky is when I want to really absorb the text - that is, read it dozens of times, go to sleep with it on my bedside table, memorise it, recite it to myself or to friends, record myself reciting it, copy it out, frame what I’ve copied out. I started to get the sense that I would need this level of devotion to Athenaze in order to use the text profitably, and I can only sustain this devotion with texts that have high and lasting intrinsic value.

To put it another way: I can see myself, 10 years from now, reciting memorised lines of the Iliad and still taking great joy in it. I can’t see myself, 10 years from now, reciting memorised conversations between Dicaeopolis the farmer and his lazy slave Xanthias with the same joy.

I waver back and forth on this point.

On one hand - yes, surely, careful study and 100% comprehension should be necessary any educational endeavour, including language learning. And having a very thorough grounding in the basics gives me a psychological security that makes the more advanced lessons less menacing.

But on the other hand, I’m also a big fan of using extensive reading as way to learn language, to allow myself to subconsciously absorb the underlying patterns. This requires me to be a bit relaxed about the reading - to allow for ambiguity such as words whose meanings I am guessing from context, sentence structures that have never been explained to me and whose workings I will eventually understand from sheer volume of exposure. It’s almost like treating language as a creative rather than analytical activity.

When I look back at my track record of language learning, the more successful ones involved me reading casually, making guesses, and pushing ahead even when I have far less than 100% comprehension, less than even the 98% that is considered standard for CI-level input. The less successful languages were where my learning had been too carefully scaffolded, such those blasted high-school classes where the teacher taught at a painfully slow pace, drilled us constantly, and ensured we remember everything before we move on. After years of study, my reading/listening comprehension was still dreadful.

I’ve yet to figure out how to strike a reasonable balance between these two approaches - to explicitly learn and drill enough that I’m not lost and frustrated when I read, but not be so focused on explicit rules that Greek becomes a decoding game instead of a reading experience. Perhaps I can learn something from Jeidsath and Barry’s comments - both seeming to use a combined approach.

10

Hi Loiesun,

Not to confuse the issue and throw another text into the mix but like yourself I started learning Greek quite recently after spending a lot of time on Latin and some modern Romance languages. I picked up the JACT Reading Greek series which is a sister companion to the Reading Latin series. I find the explanations and exercises in the JACT books to go at a good pace and work through concepts and reading .I realise you have already outlaid a lot on other texts for Greek but if you ever consider any more I can recommend this series of books.

Good luck with the journey!

11

There are actually a number of very comprehensive grammar tutorial series on Youtube:
Amy Cohen from PlayGreek has a full series based on Hansen & Quinn (which includes the paradigm chants)
Leonard Muellner from Center for Hellenic Studies has another H&Q-based series
Walter Robert’s series based on Pharr.

Thank you so much for this - exactly what I was looking for.

The videos by Amy Cohen are exceptional. Apparently, they cover about a year’s worth of traditional classroom instruction in 11 weeks.

Here’s the ‘Present Indicative Active’ - video 13 out of 111 !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwIBKTroU7Y&list=PLE6M-e2_CKhlxIqcxwSh4WfyuD7AA402X&index=13

Not sure about the counting explanation re the placing of accents.
Gotta love the Americanised 2nd person plural - ‘Y’all’. Youz guys :unamused:

Working through beginner Greek textbooks is fine up to a point.
However, for me, self-learning needs that extra oral and aural input.
Also, some commentary and parallel texts.
For example:
My challenge is to read Plato’s Symposium (forever from now !)
I found this helpful (have since bought the book):
Steadman’s site with links to Commentary, with core vocabulary and flashcards.
https://geoffreysteadman.com/platos-symposium/

So, having talked too much on here, I really, really need to get back to the basics. Taylor’s Chapter 1 - here I come…again…

12

I gotta go with Machen for beginners (J. Gresham Machen, New Testament Greek for Beginners.) First published 1923 and still in print and in use. No readings to speak of, just basics presented by a teacher who taught Greek in seminary and who knew very well, having done it for fifteen-plus years, what he was doing. From his introduction on vocabulary: “The learning of lists of words, unless the words so learned are actually used, is a waste of time.” Each chapter short with maybe a dozen words, grammar, short and concise instruction and discussion, and about twenty each of G->E and E->G sentences to translate. And occasional touches of an extremely dry sense of humor. By page 130 the student has a solid base in basics through participles.

Then a shift to Ann Groton, From Alpha to Omega. And the transition from koine to classical is easy. Both of these books, in their different ways perhaps due to differences in era and culture, emphasize stick-to-the-ribs learning. Work, but doable work, the rewards steady and cumulative, and the subject matter held back so as not to be overwhelming.

And what I prefer about Machen is that he may not present much, but what he presents is thorough. That means that from the beginning you have a decent idea of what is coming and what you have to do and to learn. This opposed to piecemeal approaches that teach a word but not a paradigm, so that at each new piece of the paradigm the word has to be relearned.

With these basics in place, one can then start to plow into the readers that are available, without having to go to the dictionary with every word, because you already have at least the basics on declensions, conjugations, and the grammar.

13

Based on the above opinions and recommendations, I see I might have to investigate another text or two.

I started using Athenaze a few months ago, and still do use it for some extra vocabulary and readings. My main disappointment with it is the piecemeal way it presents the grammatical lessons. By which I mean it will start introducing o declension nouns, but only show half the forms. Or start with verbs, but exclude the plural endings, making you wait two more lessons before getting the whole picture. I really found that maddening.

I have started reading Mastronarde’s Introduction to Attic Greek and I really like it so far. For one thing, I finally understand contonation after reading his section on accentuation.

14

Good that you’ve found a textbook that works for you. Athenaze is focused on learning by reading and tends to give you enough grammar to be able to read the passages. Mastronarde exposes the student to a lot of the complexity right away. You found Athenaze maddening; others find Mastronarde overwhelming.

You say that you finally understood contonation after reading Mastronarde. That seems about right to me. For me Mastronarde reinforces the mental scaffolding you have already started to build in learning the language.

Mark

15

Anthenaze + Supplementing the reading and excericses with the Italian books works very well for me.

I do have a few issues, though.

  • Athenaze does have little grammatical explanation. I usually go to the new Cambridge grammar if I need to make sure of things. However, it’s a bit frustrating. Syntax seems to be the least touched upon subject.


  • For some reason, I think the extra texts from the Italian books are less understandable. I can’t exactly put my finger on it. They do have plenty of extra vocabulary, but I don’t think that’s the issue. They are either more syntactically complex (though they don’t introduce new morphology), or perhaps they are just written in a less clear style.


  • Indicative subordinated clauses have appeared, but I feel like they were not properly explained. I am still not entirely clear on when ὡς and its cousin ὥστε are used. Perhaps I just haven’t reached the part of the book where they are formally introduced.

Otherwise I feel my Greek is advancing pretty well with the help of these books. I sometimes go back to Xenophon’s Kyrou Anabasis and his prose, which seems to me to be quite clear, is significantly more understandable than before. I can now recognize most verb forms and understand more words. I still have a lot to learn and master: the complete conjugation of -mi verbs, aorist and future passives, subjunctive and optative, and finally, the perfect.

Although so far Athenaze hasn’t yet gone over the optative and subjunctive. However, I am not stumped when I encounter them. But that has more to do with my knowledge of Greek ouside of what Athenaze taught me. If my knowledge of Greek began and ended with Athenaze, I think reading Xenophon would have still been neigh impossible.

As Jeidsath mentioned, it takes many years to know enough to get to the point where you don’t need to frequently consult dictionaries, grammars, and even (in the worst case) translations to read the average text. But I do think that that phase of “pretending” is crucial. If pretending is the right word, perhaps you have to fake it until you make it. It seems to me that textbooks aren’t enough to get you to that stage, so you need a good amount of hands-on experience with the language, which can only be acquired by engaging with proper Greek texts.