Hello the Greek board, where I have not posted before.
After getting to reading individual Latin authors I’ve started on Greek, working with Crosby and Schaeffer’s very spare introductory book. So far not too bad through the first 20 chapters, but I have a feeling the difficulty is about to ramp up.
Two doubts have nagged me as I progress. The first is the question of “completeness” that comes up in certain reviews of introductions to Greek. Mastronarde’s text, Introduction to Attic Greek, is praised for this quality, but perhaps this is ultimately a specious claim for an introduction to any subject. Still, is there a Greek book that is “more complete” than others, and leaves less to learn on the fly when making the transition to reading?
The second regards the paucity of exposition. Looking ahead to what I imagine are the trickier aspects of Greek, I am wondering if a few sentences are going to be sufficient to explain some of these concepts. Is this book appropriate for self-teaching? Do any self-learners here have experience going from Latin to Greek?
Smyth’s Greek Grammar is certainly complete but as reference book it suffers seriously from “paucity of exposition”. On top of that the example sentences are real Greek and are quite difficult for beginners.
It does seem a consistent fault that Greek textbooks take it really slow on the basic stuff and then really skimp on the less common forms and constructions.
One book you might look at after you have completed at least one text book is Writing Greek by Anderson and Taylor. It claims to be a Greek composition book but in reality it is a book of English to Greek exercises. Each chapter concentrates on a particular type of sentence with a clear if brief grammatical explanation of the points that the sentences are intended to illustrate.
As it is intended for intermediate students it tends to concentrate on the more difficult stuff that is the stuff that most Greek text books cover most sparsely.
And if the English to Greek sentences are too hard for you then you can always use the answer book as a Greek to English exercise book.
It’s helpful for me to distinguish between the types of books out there. We have primers and reference grammars. We call all of them “grammars.” Crosby is a primer. The grammar and morphology is organized according to lessons. Smyth is a reference grammar. Most reference grammars like Smyth first deal with morphology and then get into the grammar. All of it is organized logically, not by lessons. A subset of reference grammars are those which describe the grammar in more of a prose style (Moulton, Wallace, Robertson).
There are a few primers which are story based. They tend to be very light on grammatical explanations, but do include paradigms to demonstrate morphology. Peckett’s “Thrasymachus” and Rouse’s “Greek Boy at Home” (and companion volume “A First Greek Course”) are two examples. And there are some books which are composition based, such as Anderson & Taylor. I wouldn’t call those either a primer or a reference grammar.
Hansen & Quinn is a huge primer with as much grammar as you will find in any primer.
Smyth is a huge reference grammar with as much as you will find in any reference grammar.
Judging from your posts, I suspect that your answer to what the best way is is production. That is conversations whether spoken or online discussion threads http://discourse.textkit.com/t/topic/11961/1 or writing stories. To work either you need someone who knows Greek very well to help you or what you produce needs to be trying out what you have read in a grammar book. At least it has to be that way for me. Hence my optative practice story http://discourse.textkit.com/t/bad-neighbor-optative-practice/12834/1 was based on the relevant section of one of Taylor’s books. Even then it is thanks to the help from mwh that that story is in reasonable Greek.
So if you don’t have access to a Christofe Rico there is no escaping grammar books even if to learn effectively use them you need to invent more active ways of using them than they envisage.