One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how to get more practice with basic grammar / forms and vocabulary during my day-to-day. Flashcards are unbearably dull after awhile, and sitting down to read a text in a house full of preschoolers is nigh unto impossible for more than a few minutes a day. But one thing that I do have as a parent of many preschool-age children living on a homestead is a whole basket of phrases that I am constantly saying to my kids.
“It’s time to get up / get dressed / eat breakfast / say morning prayers / do farm chores / put your shoes on / etc etc etc.”
“Go grab the milk and bring it here / get your toys cleaned up / stop hitting your brother / don’t chase the chickens with sticks / brush your hair / leave mom alone while she’s making dinner / etc etc etc.”
I figured, why not try to translate some or all of these phrases into Ancient Greek in order to get more practice for myself and to start teaching it to all my kids? They’re already destined to be the weird homeschool kids, so why not get them speaking a dead language too?
With that said, I was curious if anyone here has any experience with such a thing. And are there any useful resources you’d recommend for going about making something like this? I have a copy of “ἕν, δύο, τρία” from Polis which has given me a little bit of a starting place, and I’ve been drawing a bit from the “ὁ φάρος” thematic lexicon as well as some of the lessons from Dickey’s “Composition and Analysis of Greek Prose”, but I’m really trying to keep the vocabulary and the constructions as simple as possible while still capturing something authentic that will help me with real Ancient Greek texts.
The really simple things are probably easy enough, like “ὥρα ἐστὶ ἀκρατίζεσθαι/ἀριστᾶν/δειπνεῖν” or “μήκετι τὸ παιδίον τῷ λίθῳ τύπτε”. But I wonder about more idiomatic things that might not translate well. Is there an Ancient Greek equivalent for something like “sleep well, sweet dreams”? Or even basic manners, like saying “please” and “thank you”? And is it possible to find some of these more “day to day” type phrases in ancient Greek texts?
Eduard Johnson: Sprechen Sie Attisch? (Do you speak Attic?)
Moderne Konversation in altgriechischer Umgangssprache
(Modern conversation in everyday Ancient Greek)
Available on Amazon (Not sure if available in English)
We discuss about Greek Colloquies here in this thread. (including Johnson’s book).
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What are your goals in learning ancient Greek? If reading classical texts such as Homer or Thucydides is your aim, these household expressions won’t advance that much. Dickey, and the vocabulary and syntactic constructions she draws on in her book, will be more useful.
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My goal is to be able to read classical texts in general, yeah. I can read simple texts to some extent. Anything more complicated than the narrative portions of the new testament or the septuagint are challenging for me without some serious crutches. I’ve been on the “intermediate plateau” for awhile now.
The trouble that I have isn’t necessarily trying to “advance” so much as it is to just maintain the ground I’ve already gained in the sometimes lengthy stretches between dedicated study sessions. Flashcards can make for helpful review, but the dull repetition of the same old cards over and over again becomes rather stale and really damages the motivation. So then there’s the inevitable “We all got a stomach bug, I’m working 6 days in a row, now the power is out and I have to drive the kids and wife to grandma’s house while I slave for three more days to keep the livestock alive through an ice storm” and then it’s been two weeks since I’ve even looked at anything Greek at all. Anki deck now has a backlog of 1000 cards, and the text I was working on has completely left my mind. Now I have to spend a day at least lightly reviewing some of the grammar basics because things will be forgotten. That’s time I could spend actually trying to make progress, but instead I’m working to regain some of the ground I lost because of the time gap.
I guess my thought in this approach would be to simply take some of the very basic core concepts of grammar and apply them to things I’m doing constantly in order to more firmly cement them so they no longer require review. In addition, since I literally live on a sheep farm in the country and have a large household, there are a surprising number of things that coincide between my lifestyle and the sort of things that, say, Hesiod was on about in Works and Days. It’s not 1:1, but the similarities are enough that I find myself linking a lot of the vocabulary I’m learning to things I actually touch very frequently. Like there’s that stupid scene in the first few chapters of Athenaze where Dekaiopolis and Xanthias are lugging a heavy rock out of the field and Xanthias drops it on his master’s foot; well, that literally happened to me on the farm at about the time I was first working through that chapter and I walked with a limp for more than a year afterwards. I’ve never forgotten it 