I was wondering, Im currently studying Latin using the book Lingua Latina Per se Illustrata, which uses the inductive method rather than a systematical exposition of grammatical rules.
Is there an equivalent book to this in Ancient Greek?
Its only a passing thought since it’ll be a while until I feel comfortable with Latin texts and will be able to move to another language, but I would love to learn Greek one day, and from my experience I learn faster and clearer using this inductive method so it’ll be nice to be able to plan ahead…
Currently, no there isn’t. (And we have ALL bemoaned the lack thereof.) The closest thing is the JACT Reading Greek program in three volumes, which is just traditional grammar with lots of easy reading stories. There’s also Athenaze, but it’s the same approach as JACT, except without the answers to the exercises (which makes it bad for independent learners).
If you’re adventurous, you can try for the Italian edition of Athenaze. Luis Miraglia translated Athenaze into Italian, and enamored as he was with LL, expanded all the readings to make them much, much longer, and had LLPSI-style pictures drawn to accompany the stories so you could acquire more of the vocabulary inductively. However, the grammar part and exercises are all in Italian. We were all hoping the next American edition of Athenaze would incorporate his changes, but it didn’t.
Also, although it doesn’t get mentioned much around here, about a hundred years ago W. H. Rouse produced an easy-reading Greek book with a continuous storyline, A Greek Boy at Home, to accompany his First Greek Course textbook. Anne Mahoney has recently revised both books, retitling the first to Rouse’s Greek Boy.
I liked Thrasymachus: Greek Through Reading quite a bit. It is not exactly like Lingua Latina, but it does have vocabulary lists and it starts off simple and gets progressively harder. I think you would like it a lot if you like Lingua Latina.
I have also used Steadman’s books, although they supposedly contain some mistakes. (He himself admits his print on demand books are works in progress. He is editing them as he gets feedback. By the way, they are very inexpensive and you can even download the pdf of the book from his website.)
