Do authors of primers needlessly confuse us ?

Hey all … I read two articles last night that dwelt on the concept of voice in ancient greek. One of the author’s conclusions is that teaching about deponency in greek verbs should be ABANDONED as wrong-headed and historically misleading and outright confusing. Wow is that a relief! Here I was dreading mastering the idea of sorting out deponent verbs into two different groups and having to distinguish between them !.. middle deponents and passive deponents. How happy I am to know that the whole concept can just be dispensed with!

The articles may be found here under “materials from years past”

http://ioa.com/~cwconrad/

(Incidentally the other articles are also interesting, especially the compendium of greek phonology)

Right now I am primarily using two texts: Basics of Biblical Greek by Mounce and Learn Biblical Greek by Dobson. Dobson basically says we don’t need much formal instruction in grammar .. that what grammar we do require can absorbed more or less intuitively. Mounce takes a highly structured grammatical approach. I general I favor the Dobson approach but don’t find it entirely sufficient.

I supposed I could have posted this in the outside links section but post it here because I am interested what others might think about the best approach to learning languages in general is .. and in particular what is the most advantageous method for learning some form of ancient greek!

Well it depends on what one calls “too much Grammar” doesn’t it? It goes without saying that, if what you study ancient Greek for example for is to enjoy some texts in their original form you don’t need to learn every single grammatical detail, you don’t need to know all the terminology and such and so on and so forth. As long as you have a good grammar book to concsult in case you get stuck I personally don’t know why you should know how X is called etc as long as you can translate it correctly.
But here’s the catch: if you don’t know enough grammar how are you going to translate it correctly?

So yes, when my teacher used to ask me why “Y” is the object of the verb and expected me to reply cause the verb “X” takes its object in accusative I didn’t even know what to reply (later I would just find the bloody object, see what kind of verb it was and answer just to keep her happy). I never bothered learning which verbs take their object in accusative. For me this is plain silly since accusative is the main case for objects.
And I am not overtly interested if the mood of a verb is reflexive or neuter .
But I need to know both declination and syntax of any language to be able to know for example a) what LYSAI might be and b) what it actually is in this case.