While we all have different ways of working I don’t think is true. How can you translate something if you don’t understand how the Greek works? Translation should always be the last step in once you have understood the text in Greek.
Often I see students who think they have the gist of something proceed to an incorrect translation because they haven’t understood the syntax at all. Once you have got an idea of what you think a passage means in English it is very hard to shift away from that. I think you recognise that. We see it on these boards all the time.
Reading relatively simple sentences such as you find in Reading Greek gives you an opportunity to develop this skill. If when you are reading a sentence you are simultaneously trying to translate and understand the syntax that seems like a lot of work on two different objectives.
So I think it is vital that beginners put translation aside as the main objective and concentrate instead on understanding the syntax. Eventually you will notice a lot without consciously thinking about it.
I certainly very badly expressed myself because you misunderstood me.
Never did I suggest that one begin studying a language by immediately trying to translate texts. No, the situation here is that, WHILE you are beginning to study a language, you may elsewhere come across quotes or passages that you happen to like or become puzzled about. Intellectual curiosity pushes you to try to understand the original text but only with the help of wonderful forums like this one may you get a real translation and, what’s more, you’ll for sure learn a few things along the way.
So while you are working elsewhere you may, only as the icing on the cake, have the opportunity to appreciate the taste of nice quotes in the language you are interested in.
Never neither did I claim to have any gist of anything and I have always talked about me with the terms “amateur” and “absolute beginner”.
Your judicious insight that “reading relatively simple sentences such as you find in Reading Greek” is the only way to acquire the knowledge and feeling of the peculiar syntax of a language is precisely what I have undertaken to do in the first place, though using another book, a french one of the same kind which method is exactly to gradually introduce more and more syntactic forms of sentences and more and more complex ones so that the student progressively gets accustomed to the specificities of the language.
For a language of the complexity of Ancient Greek you may not escape then from shifting to the more demanding method of working on a traditional grammar textbook.
I doubt not that you may have experienced today’s young students displaying a more presumptuous attitude but here I may assure you that we are exactly on the same line.
To support this statement may I use another quote that I collected in order to sustain my persistence in this daunting entreprise and that you will very rightly consider far “above my pay grade” in Ancient Greek: