I am hoping to master all words uttered in the dialogues of the plays in less than 5,000 hours. I am trying to read as much diverse sources of Greek as early as I can. I am picking and parsing small sentences of the Septuagint and of Sophocles and Homer and doing JACT’s Greek Course on the side. Is my strategy the most efficient? My goal is too be able to read and get acquainted with Sophocles foremost. He is the reason why I am learning Attic.
When you say you’re aiming to master all the words in Sophocles’ dialogues, it’s not clear what you mean. Do you just mean all the words that occur in the spoken trimeters of his extant plays? That would be a rather more sensible undertaking than trying to master the entirety of the Sophoclean lexicon, including the lyric passages. Even so, Sophocles’ vocabulary is context-specific, and to learn each word in isolation means excluding metrical and communicative factors and much else. I think you’d find it more profitable to read dialogue as dialogue. You might start with one play (with or without the choral odes) and move on from there.
And I don’t think fluency is a realistic goal, for you or for anyone. I’d say you should finish the JACT course first. There’s no shortcut to Sophocles.
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Yes. My goal was mastering only all words on the trimeters and use Perseus vocabulary tools as a rare reference. Should I go at Homer and Sophocles at the same time, after JACT?
That’s up to you. Homer is foundational for all subsequent Greek literature, but tragedy has an appreciably different vocabulary and style, so if you want to tackle Sophocles right after JACT, I dare say you could. But my advice would be to do more Homer first. Or you could do both, or alternate between them.
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5000 hours is a reasonable amount of time, I’m just concerned that when you write: “I am picking and parsing small sentences of the Septuagint and of Sophocles and Homer”, that that might imply that you’re not reading the elementary textbooks. Are you reading Athenaze and Alexandros and Ancient Greek Alive? I read 200,000 words of elementary text before I moved on to the authentic authors, the process took about 1100 hours, depending on how you count the time. But also everything I read had an audio to go with it and I would listen to the audio 5 times. I also did a lot of reverse translation, that is, translating from English into Greek and I’ve also done about 200 hours of speaking. But I’m actually still not entirely ready for the genuine authors. I would get to the point where you can read the elementary books almost perfectly, see how much time it takes then move on to easiest of the genuine authors which is the Gospel of John, then move on to something slightly more advanced, some of Lucian’s easier dialogues, then maybe Xenophon’s Anabasis. After that, when you’ve mastered those authors and you’ve seen that it has taken maybe 2 or 3000 hours then I think you’ll see whether or not your goal is reasonable.
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I forgot to justify reading elementary texts. I did that sort of thing when I was young. I would start with the Iliad or the Koran or Goethe’s Faust or Racine’s Phaedra (which actually isn’t all that hard) or the Bhagavad Gita or the Divine Comedy and would disdain the elementary texts. The human mind can’t process all of that new information and consequently it all appears to be a senseless morass. I learned the hard way to not start a foreign language by reading the most prestigious and lauded books first.
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I tackled a few hundred lines of Sophocles on Saturday and found that there were a fair number of words that I didn’t know. So I wrote up a custom GPT to take a text and provide the definition (in classical Greek), a made up example, along with part of speech etc (in classical Greek) for any word that I didn’t know. It was a pleasant way to read and quickly build vocab. It requires a GPT model with a fair amount of dinkum thinkum, and I’m experimenting with adding the entire LSJ + Smyth as context to really force it to stick to classical Greek.
The result is basically a gloss like this for each hard word:
στιπτή (στιπτός)
• Σημασία: συμπεπιεσμένη, πυκνή, σφιγμένη.
• Παράδειγμα: «στιπτὴ στρωμνὴ ἐκ φύλλων κεῖται.»
• Λέξις: ἐπίθετον θηλ. ἑν.
You have to be alert to the inevitable errors, but as Markos used to correctly and tirelessly point out here, years ago, sticking in-language makes a huge difference for vocabulary acquisition.
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No. I am not using any readers other than texts of JACT. The Septuagint and JACT are working as my primers. I am torn if it would actually be helpful to add the Greek New Testament or not? I have heard that the greek on most of it deviates more heavily than that of the Septuagint, but that it is easier to turn it into a reader of sorts.
I seldom use GPT 4 or 5 with Latin or Greek. It is a better use of time in my opinion to go over various translations of the same extract and to consult lexicons and grammars. Even in my mother tongue, which is by no means a minor language I may add, GPT commits mistakes and parses pronouns incorrectly. GPT 4 once confused “no”- direct object proclitic pronoun as “quem não no disse” with “no”-preposition. And look the Portuguese speaking database is very likely larger than the French, German and Italian ones.
GPT 4o or GPT 5 are non-”thinking” models. For most things Greek or Latin you need a thinking model: o3 or GPT 5-Thinking or Grok 4. You’ll also want substantial instructions telling it to stick to “classical Greek” and exactly what that means.