After learning classical Latin for the last ten years I would like to take the plunge with classical Greek. The Latin books I have used is the three volume set “Using Latin” long out of print but which I found better than Wheelock because the grammar lessons went into more detail and I enjoyed the challenge of progressively more difficult stories to translate, many of which were taken from the Gallic Wars. I am looking for something similar for learning classical Greek, texts which get progressively more difficult and are not dumbed down too much. Can the forum members recommend any books? Thank you, Paul.
I liked Reading Greek by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers (Cambridge University Press), but I don’t know how similar or different it is to Using Latin in its approach.
I second bedwere’s commendation of JACT’s Reading Greek. Get both parts.
I would get
- Text and Vocabulary 9780521698511
- Grammar and Exercises 9780521698511
- An Independent Study Guide to Reading Greek 9780521698504
Of course, Textkit is available for questions and corrections, but the independent study guide is very useful. Of course, you don’t need to buy directly from CUP, which is more expensive.
would the introductory course by hardy hansen be worth looking into?
I liked Greek to GCSE by John Taylor, and am now using his wonderful Greek Beyond GCSE. Taylor was commissioned by some official school board in the UK to write these books in response to the problems students were having with the JACT book. I believe the grammar in the Taylor book is more systematic. It is also paired with extensive, progressively more difficult, readings from classical authors, mostly Herodotus. I’m at the point in his series where his version of Herodotus is only barely simplified. I bought JACT, Mastronarde and all the other usual contenders and, after reviewing them, returned them all except Taylor. They all have their pluses and minuses, but I found that Taylor has the best combination of clear/rigorous grammar, subordinating less important grammatical points, and teaching you to read narrative.
Taylor is good, I agree, but fails to teach accents from the start. This may not be a major flaw, depending on how you feel about accents, but learning accentuation later on is much harder.
Since my only objective is to read and understand ancient Greek authors in the original, I care about accents only to the extent the same letters accented in different ways produce different meanings. My sense so far — please correct me if I’m wrong — is that Taylor’s approach doesn’t significantly impede my progress towards that goal and may (like his deferral of the dual number until the end) indeed enhance it by not further overloading a mind already tasked, for example, with learning hundreds of forms for each verb. I might feel differently if I weren’t taking up Greek at nearly seventy and had many decades ahead of me to learn Greek — somewhat ironic given that Taylor’s books were designed for teenagers.
“Lady’s Greek, without the accents,” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning described it. As you point out, Taylor is the slave of the examination boards. I suppose we must be grateful that they still allow schoolboys and girls to sit an examination in Greek.