Hi there, I need a bit of help. Could some please compare and contrast the relative difficulties of Latin and Ancient Greek for me? I am truly in love with both languages and would like to learn as much as I can of both of them.
My personal experience is, that although my Latin instruction was far stricter and more solid than my Greek instruction, I was far better at Greek than at Latin. This may have had to do with the kind of texts we would read: Homer and Herodotus may be a lot easier to read than Cicero, after all.
In highschool, we started with the difficult Latin stuff (Cicero) and ended with the more readable Petronius. In Greek we started with the easier stuff (Homer, Herodotus), to end with the heavy stuff (Plato). That may have been a factor in my appreciation of the difficulty of the respective languages.
I have never studied Latin, so I cannot answer your question very well.
But.
You say you love both languages and would like to learn both of them. Personally, I recommend learning one and then the other, not both at once. And I recommend learning Greek first, whether or not it is more difficult. Almost all Roman authors knew Greek and its literature well, and assumed their audience was the same. The reverse does not apply to Ancient Greek literature since most of it is older.
When you look at dictionaries, a Greek one is easily twice as big as a Latin one. We have, so to speak, only one literary Latin but many Greek dialects. Greek is generally speaking much more fluid, i.e. more elusive than Latin. At a given level of difficulty, Greek composition is more difficult than Latin composition.
On the other hand, because Greek literature is often much more natural and vivid than the Latin one, Greek can rise much more interest from a student, so he can better enjoy studying Greek, hence get better results.
I think Latin is way harder to master; I don’t understand these votes! My experience has been this: Latin starts off pretty easy, but gets harder. Latin can be very compact, with one sentence requiring a paragraph of English to translate it (okay, exaggerating here). Greek starts hard, with the strange alphabet and third mood and third voice etc., but gets easier. All those extra forms mean more memorization work that Latin, but once you really start reading, those extra forms make it easier to understand what’s being said.
To put it bluntly: I’ve been studying Latin for 4 years and Greek for 2. I’m as good at Greek as I am at Latin.