Sooo, against many reservations I’ve decided to form part of the debate.
First and foremost, all the following comments and suggestions that I’ll make are only valid IF a radical change in the methodology is implemented (it’s irrelevant if you are a self-taught learner or a student in a university or high school course).
I strongly believe that the first step into a more effective learning (and teaching) of Greek (or any other language for that matter) is to completely abandon that outdated, boring, unappealing and ineffective methodology of torturing the pupil with “morphological-syntactical analysis” and “translation” of Greek phrases into English, and forcing him to memorize tables upon tables of declensions and looking into the dictionary for every single word he does not understand.
We should under no circumstances present the pupil with intricate “translation methods” that are eerily reminiscent of solving a Sudoku Puzzle. Teaching languages is not teaching math and we should not treat it as such. We should endeavour to teach languages (yes, even dead languages) the natural way (that is the same way we learn our mother tongue). One only need look into how modern languages are taught and imitate it. The best example of this is Ørberg’s Lingua Latīna per sē illūstrāta and Arthur M. Jensen’s Nature Methods for modern languages (Do read the prefaces of Mr. Jensen’s English by the Nature Method or indeed the preface of any of Mr. Jensen’s courses, Ørberg’s own justification and defence of the method should be enough to convince the sceptics).
If we follow these didactic principles, we’ll conclude that there is no need to torture the pupil with “translations exercises” or “morphological analyses” or any such nonsense. If we let the pupil kindly and gradually “discover” the grammatical rules with the aid of images, synonyms or slightly varied sentences in the context of a meaningful and coherent “story” in which he can infer the meaning of the new words, and above all repetition and imitation, then the pupil will have no trouble understanding the systematic and theoretical explanation of a grammar with its tables and its verbose linguistic jumble since he already knows what the text says.
Instead of translating decontextualised and random phrases into English the pupil should UNDERSTAND the meaning of the phrases in a MEANINGFUL context, if necessary, answer questions “Reading Comprehension-style” (Questions in GREEK and answers also in GREEK), then try and use what he already knows to say or write (still in GREEK) that same answer in another way, with synonyms or phraseology or different word order, etc. When the pupil has enough Greek on his back he should try and translate small phrases of English INTO Greek (never the other way around) and eventually try his hand in composition but only after he has had a good taste of real Greek (Plato and Xenophon being the best for starters). Cf. Prof. Thomson’s article quoted below.
This method is real, effective and every year dozens and dozens of pupils from around the world archive an active and competent command of Greek and Latin at the Vivarium Novum Academy using it. You can find a lot of testimonies of successfull implementation of the method here, here and here. (More complete bibliographies are available in the Latīnē doceō book, the Spanish version is free online).
Those clarifications aside, I’ll make a little list of the good materials that already exists and point out briefly what I think their deficiencies are along and my thoughts and rambles.
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I’ve already reviewed Prof. Zuntz’s Griechischer Lehrgang, which I consider to be the best method for Greek available and pointed out its flaws in the mentioned review and in other posts where I suggested many other materials. Although it is not stricto sensu a graded reader it can be perfectly used as such, it has the advantage of containing almost only “real Greek” instead of the “home-grown” or “home-made” Greek that Professor Zuntz so despised. Its Grammatical companion and vocabulary are of exceptional help and its proposed exercises do provide the perfect opportunity and encouragement to engage in the reading and comprehension questions I mentioned, as well as composition and review. Its only flaw (in my humble opinion) is that it’s still too attached to the old “grammatical-analysis” method or at least it can prove very tempting to fall into that nightmarish methodology or its evil twin the “translation method”. That aside the lack of an answers sheet can prove disturbing to the self-taught learners.
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I’ve also already praised the Italian version of the Athenaze in the mentioned review and post (The original English version has been so thoroughly surpassed by the Italian version that I cannot conceive of any reason to consult it other than the inability to read Italian, the English Workbooks however do offer some utility). It is by far the best (although still not perfect) implementation of the Nature Method for the teaching of Greek, it’s comparable to Ørberg’s Lingua Latīna per sē illūstrāta in depth, quality and friendliness to the pupil. Along with its exercise books, it forms a very good learner’s package, it includes a summary of the grammar and each chapter has an Enchiridion (or explanation), exercises and a vocabulary. It does lack an answer’s sheet, but the only real flaw that it may have is that a great deal of the first volume is not “original Greek”, that must be admitted, but in defence of the books I call not only on Prof. Miraglia’s thorough knowledge of Greek but on the expertise, experience and unrivalled competence of the people who revised and corrected Miraglia’s Greek, among others: Prof. Dr. Herwig Görgemanns and Prof. Enrico Renna. The second volume is practically an anthology of original Greek so Prof. Zuntz’s criticisms of “home-grown” Greek do not apply.
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Peckett & Munday’s Thrasymachus: A New Greek Course has already been reviewed by Prof. Zuntz in the articles quoted below, so I omit further comment other than the praise on its (at the time, unequalled) innovatory conception, it has been surpassed by the Athenaze.
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The celebrated Reading Greek of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers. It was this book’s popularity which ultimately defeated Prof. Zuntz’s attempts to publish his method in England and forced him to seek better luck elsewhere. Its a very, very good reader and method. It has the unrivalled advantage of being a living and thriving project so its under constant revision and edition. It has a very holistic approach best represented by its Independent Study Guide or its companion volume The World of Athens. It is the only other reader that can compete with Athenaze in its vividness and natural proclivity to be used according to the principles of the Nature Method. More thorough reviews of the method and its parts are available here, here, here, here, and here.
If Athenaze can claim that it passed Prof. Görgemanns’ punctilious examination, Reading Greek answers that the legendary Prof. Kenneth J. Dover is responsible for a great deal of the Greek text. So like with Athenaze I believe Prof. Zuntz’s reticence of “home-grown” Greek would be uncalled for in this case.
That’s it. There are of course other methods and readers (and several anthologies which might be used as readers). But I believe the best materials have already been mentioned, it is in no way little, but sadly none of the mentioned readers and methods its perfect on its own, so curiosity, good sense and discipline should come to rescue when one reader fails to reach someone’s expectations.
Buuuuut. I believe that deep down the problem is not so much as the lack of material what’s hurting Greek Studies, but the misuse (or incompetent use) of what we have available, specially with that appallingly infective methodology of “grammatical analysis” and “Greek to English translations”. (Again, read Prof. Thomson’s article)
What I do find lacking is enough reviews, criticism and feedback on the mentioned readers (or indeed any other method) with a “Nature method approach” for Greek. In Latin it would be impossible to numerate the didactic material, the praises, the testimonies, the suggestions that Ørberg’s method gets (that fact that I have to quote articles which deal more with Latin teaching than Greek because I could not find equivalents or suitable replacements speaks for itself).
There are also a lot of very good anthologies and selections of authors (for middle to advanced students), some of which I’ve mentioned before, that are a great help, if I had time (and motivation) I would write a comprehensive list of those I’ve used… In this department I find that the greatest obstacle is not the lack of good, user-friendly, thorough and competent material but the fact that much of the material available is almost always in German, Italian, Spanish, French or even Dutch and Russian and at times Polish; luckily a lot of it is in English, but sadly not enough.
Lastly I leave a promotional video for the Summer School at the Vivarium Novum and a list of videos of my friends and teachers SPEAKING coherent, elegant Latin as a proof of the enormous success and mastery of a dead language that can be archived if one uses a more human and living approach to teaching and learning the language. I hope that in a few years I might be able to find so many videos of people speaking Ancient Greek.
For further reading.
ZUNTZ, Günther. On Greek primers. Didaskalos 4.2 (1973) pp. 360-374 ZUNTZ, Günther. Griechischer Anfängerunterricht - Gestern, heute und morgen. Der altsprachliche Unterricht. Reihe XVII, Heft 5 (1974) pp. 41-64 ZUNTZ, Günther. Linguistics and the Teaching of Greek. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1973/1974), pp. 381-400.
ZUNTZ, Günther. On First Looking into Chase and Phillips: Notes on the Teaching of Beginners’ Greek. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 362-373.
BROOKS, E. J. Directa methodus. The Classical Review, Vol. 41, No. 6 (Dec., 1927), pp. 209-211
THOMSON, Ian. The Nature Method of Latin Instruction at Indiana University. The Classical World, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Nov., 1972), pp. 148-157
THOMSON, Ian. Further Thoughts on the Nature Method. The Classical World, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Sep., 1976), pp. 9-15
RIMBAULT, Olivier. Au sujet de la méthode de latin du Professeur Ørberg (Remarques sur la didactique des langues anciennes). Réflexion(s), avril 2012 (http://reflexions.univ-perp.fr/). Or here.