Compared to some of the claims people using LLPSI and such make, I’ve heard varying claims about how much you even can learn Homeric/Early Greek. Some people talking about how Homer & Hesiod are absolutely manageable, don’t be afraid to start with them, and so on. And then you have one scholar with a decently well-known Homeric tutorial series on YouTube (blanking on the name right now, this was a while back) almost lamenting about how difficult it is for even scholars to “hold onto” Homeric. How he’s/they’re always going back to dictionaries, forgetting everything - endlessly relearning, it really sounded like or he straight-up claimed.
Obviously, even writing in English, I occasionally have to refer to the dictionary or ain’t none too sure bout proper grammar like. Ditto for French - a bit more than English, since it’s a language I learned but haven’t used extensively in a while, but it’s still there. And with Attic/Koine, plenty of folks online seem to be very comfortable with it, it’s there for them.
I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like I’m gonna out-do a true-blue scholar, but I’m holding out hope that with all this conflicting advice, maybe that was just a relative lament. Like how a pro athlete will talk about how terrible they are compared to some of their peers, while still literally running laps around even the next percentile of elite beneath them.
Absolutely it’s doable. After a while you may find you’re able to read much of Homer almost as well as you can read English (or French, let’s say) and almost as fast. Once you learn to pick up on the built-in cues and not fuss too much over fiddly grammatical details it flows quite rapidly for the most part, verse by verse, though some of the technical vocabulary can hold you up.
I recommend using Cunliffe’s Homeric Lexicon along with the Greek, and perhaps the Loeb translation at the outset (but only at the outset).
Here’s the first verse of the Iliad, to get you started:
μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληιάδεω Ἀχιλῆος.
“Sing, goddess” (ἄειδε, θεά) “the wrath” (μῆνιν) “of Peleus’ son Achilles.”
Very glad to hear it - any idea where that scholar was coming from, then?
Something I saw on Reddit recently was a discussion about how far forward you could theoretically go with just Attic. So start in the Classical period, and just gently push forward, taking a few writers from each century at a time, all the way to the end of the Byzantine period. The general consensus was that regardless of exactly how far you could go, you’d have to stop before reaching modern Greek, but by that point you’d have developed such an intuitive understanding of the language you could probably pick it up almost casually.
All that to say that of course someone jumped in about how you really should just start with Homer, if you’re gonna do all that.
