Greek for conversational/writing fluency

Greek Learning Greek
1

Hello,

Does anyone know any resources for building fluency in Greek through active output? I’ve heard it’s a good idea to write a journal or such to produce Greek actively. I’m going through Hansen and Quinn and find it doesn’t teach the active use of Greek very much, which leads to Greek being much less easy to learn than in my experience learning living languages in which one can create an immersive environment. The grammar I don’t find that overwhelming as it is generally logical but the vocab and irregularities are very difficult to recall and learn efficiently when everything is so far above appropriate level comprehensible input for a beginner and there is no one to speak it with. Any tips to learn ancient Greek vocabulary applicable to daily life and aquire fluency in Greek more actively?

I also have tended to use modern pronunciation as it seems more natural to me but besides biblical texts can’t find anything on YouTube that teaches living ancient Greek with that. Are any ancient pronunciations mutually intelligible with modern pronunciation as it is with classical and ecclesiastical Latin? Or good way to switch between modern and Erasmian pronunciations as needed?

2

Speaking Ancient Greek as a Living Language. If one has already some knowledge of grammar and syntax, it can help reach fluency.

3

I have recently acquired this book just yesterday and have yet to explore it in depth. It seems designed for a classroom. How should one use it for self study? I take it at this point it would be more helpful to learn ancient pronunciation?

4

Does anyone know any resources for building fluency in Greek through active output?

Greek Prose Composition For Schools, North and Hillard, is an example of a textbook that concentrates on the active.
There are others.

There is also a key to accompany North & Hillard.


Another approach staying with H&Q is to have a notebook with all of the examples contained in H&Q, with the Greek on the left of the page and the English on the right of the page.

You can then cover the left and see if you can readily go from the English to the Greek.
That is, you do the exercise in reverse, if it was originally as exercise in translating Greek to English.
Come back often after an interval.

5

I used the previous edition, doing all the exercises and listening to the readings many times. But there is a Teacher’s Volume. With modern pronunciation I can’t distinguish between εἶμι, ἵημι, and ἴοιμι. For me this is a sufficient reason not to use it.

6

Agree with bedwere. It makes no sense to learn ancient Greek and pronounce it as Modern Greek.

(Unless your objective is to go to Greece and talk to people about their ancient Greek classes.)

Mastronarde has an excellent chapter on pronunciation which should be enough.

7

Ok thanks! I will switch to ancient pronunciation. It hopefully won’t be too much of a switch. How far did the Polis Speaking Ancient Greek as a Living Language get you would you say? Is the teacher’s edition necessary?

Yeah I’ve been doing the exercises from Hansen and Quinn it just isn’t enough to internalize true fluency and the vocabulary isn’t particularly useful for composing as a living language(it was 5 chapters in before I learned ποιέω!). Also it’s tedious to write sentences like “Homer instructs the men on the island to sacrifice to the gods” a million times.

8

The first edition covers enough morphology and syntax to read (and speak) simple koine. That’s why I would use it as a supplement to your H&Q, not as an alternative. I don’t own the second, expanded edition

As for the teacher’s edition, I quote from the website:

This volume is intended for self-taught readers. It comprises a handbook of grammar with the grammatical lexicon, declensions and conjugations studied in the first volume, the keys to all the exercises, a list of differences between Attic and Koine dialects, and all text translations.

9

Also very helpful to do those commands from Rico’s videos:
https://www.youtube.com/@poliskoine

And as Bedwere writes, it’s good to listen to the texts. I listened to them while cleaning, shopping, etc.

I also used that book a few years ago. I found two people from our church and we went through the whole book together. Without a teacher. Mostly we gave each other the commands and exercises from the book. It was very helpful. We met once a week for about 1.5 hours. We went through the whole book in a year.

10

If this is your goal, the best way in my experience is to use it as much as you can, minimising the translation element as much as possible.

Composition books will give you English sentences and ask you to translate them, the idea being that you focus on how to express certain structures or concepts in Greek (conditionals, narrative or whatever it might be). This is of course extremely useful, but it will never really be “active” inasmuch as you aren’t expressing your own ideas, and the fluency you acquire will always be limited because you are first thinking of the English word and then translating it - e.g. “Table. What’s that in Greek? τράπεζα”. It would be much better from a fluency perspective to just look at the object and think of the Greek word (that’s one of the reasons why language teachers use flashcards with images instead of asking students to translate).

So my advice would be (as a supplementary activity - you’ll need to keep following a coursebook of some kind to get the language input) to look at images and describe (first orally and then in writing) what’s happening in Greek, only using English when unavoidable. Obviously, you won’t know the words for everything in the image, so you’ll have to find out. If you had a teacher, this would be really easy, as you could just point and ask, do a mime, describe it using other Greek words etc… But as you don’t, you’ll have to look them up in an English-Greek dictionary, such as this one:

https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/efts/woodhouse/woodhouse_search.html

Only use the dictionary as a last resort - if you can’t remember a word immediately, give yourself time to think about it, and if you’re unsure if you’ve remembered it correctly, make the sentence with your best guess and then check in the dictionary afterwards.

This can de done at any level - a relative beginner might just describe the people and objects (present tense only) whereas if you’re more advanced you could speculate about how the people are feeling or construct a whole narrative (e.g. what happened before and afterwards, using a variety of tenses, aspects and moods) or a dialogue.

The disadvantage of this is that there’s no answer key, and you’re going to make loads of mistakes, but that’s normal. Ideally you would have someone check them for you, but otherwise just go back periodically and look for errors yourself.

If you want to be really authentic you could use images from Greek vases.

11

Thanks! Will get teacher’s edition and listen to audio. Besides the dictionary, what’s a good way to learn useful words? Also is there a dictionary of sorts for neologisms in Greek (perhaps borrow from modern here?) I.e ancient Greek doesn’t have a word for car computer etc.

12

There are quite a few sets of ancient Greek vocab flashcards on Anki, including one with the Hansen and Quinn vocabulary… I haven’t used any of them myself, but it should be worth checking them out. Maybe another member can recommend a specific set?

13

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