Classical Greek texts with macrons?

[Barry_Hofstetter]

How so? Obviously you won’t have learnt correct quantities but why should you have learnt wrong ones?

Why? I would think it’s obvious. But before speaking of reasons, if you’d like to see the effect for yourself, go ask someone who has studied Greek (or Latin) this way to read a line of prose aloud. You’ll find that they make nearly all the vowels short except for the accented ones, which they’ll invariably lengthen. And then when they read poetry, you get to hear them forcing the meter onto words, like song, rather that letting it come out of the syllables, like poetry.

This, of course, has a great deal to do with the way English works. It can be overcome, but takes a bit of effort.

[jeidsath]

I’ve heard the same from a diverse group. Nothing English-specific about it. The only way to learn the vowel quantities of a language is to actually learn the vowel quantities. If you spend a long time with a language without doing this, you won’t get them right. There is nothing surprising about that.