Initial Thoughts on Learning Greek--Athenaze

Greek Learning Greek
1

Having started my study of Attic Greek five weeks ago, I have some reflections that may be helpful to other beginners, or that may prompt suggestions from those more experienced. As background, I am a native English speaker and my Italian is pretty good. I have completed LLPSI over the last year.

Athenaze (English edition) has been on my shelf since about 1990, but content in (English) Athenaze seemed too sparse when I tried a couple of times to get started. I decided to start working through Mastronarde’s Attic Greek. That lasted about a week because, spoiled by LLPSI, I did not feel I was engaging with the language enough with this grammar-intensive approach. So I invested in the Italian edition of Athenaze along with the Quaderno di esercizi and Meletemata. The added margin content, drawings and text in the Italian edition are definitely worth the investment, but since English is my reference language, I prefer to create Greek/English flashcards to practice vocabulary and I use the English Workbook. While the English Workbook is somewhat redundant with the Italian Esercizi, I find that the Meletemata is a good addition to the workbook exercises. As a result, my approach has evolved to: 1. Text with frequent reference to Luke Ranieri’s YouTube video for pronunciation and listening practice; 2. Vocabulary (Anki flashcards); 3. English Workbook and Meletemata exercises. I am disappointed, however, that there is no answer key to the workbook exercises. (The Teacher’s guide has an answer key to exercises found in the textbook but not the workbook.) The LLPSI Teacher’s Guide was much more useful in this regard.

Chapter I of LLPSI was a cakewalk compared to Chapter I of Athenaze. The language is simpler and the vocabulary more intuitive to an English speaker, so I am only now finishing Chapter I. In part, this is because I hope my added investment in learning proper pronunciation, in understanding how the accent rules actually work in the text, and in learning the vocabulary in the gloss will make the path easier going forward.

2

I am also using both Athenazes, currently on chapter 11. I started out using the Italian version as my main text, only using the English version as a complement (grammatical explanations and translation exercises, since I don’t speak Italian). However, I have come to realise that the Greek text that was written for the English book does not carry over very nicely to the LLPSI inspired concept with drawings explaining new words. The ideas are often too complex to illustrate easily and I have to double-check my interpretation with a dictionary. So now I’m using the English book primarily, with the extra readings from the Italian book as a complement. The extra readings were written directly for the Italian version and don’t have the same problem.

I have noticed that even the main text is not always the same. In the first few chapters the differences are minor, but in chapter 10, the English version introduces the future tense while the Italian version doesn’t. I don’t know if there will be more differences later on.