On a French forum where teachers of Latin and Greek discussed how little Greek, or sometimes no Greek at all, they got to teach for want of interested students, several of them pointed out that Greek is an especially ‘high-maintenance’ language and that if you stop teaching it for a few years, you very soon start to lose it. They even mentioned cases of former classmates of theirs who studied Greek to a very high level in college but went on to work in other fields, and five years later, at an alumni reunion, they said they were absolutely incapable of reading most of the texts they could understand effortlessly while in college. In contrast this issue seemed nowhere near as blatant in the case of Latin, which seems to require less maintenance.
As a beginner, this worries me, considering the amount of time and energy I am about to dedicate to Greek over the next several years. To proficient readers of Greek, what is your experience? Do you really need to read some Greek on a daily basis to keep it from fading away?
Not necessarily daily, but work through several substantial texts a year intensively, using commentaries and a dictionary, and also having Smyth’s grammar handy. (The Cambridge Grammar is excellent, too, and more informed by modern linguistics, but it’s not as comprehensive as Smyth.) The availability of LSJ and Bailly online on the Logeion site is really useful.
You might also work through Dickey’s book on Greek prose composition at some point, especially if you feel your grasp of grammar is rusty.
There’s plenty to read: Homer, Plato, Lysias, Herodotus, tragedy, eventually Thucydides and Aristophanes, who are more difficult and require a greater investment of time and effort.
Demosthenes wrote a number of shorter speeches – the Philippics and OLynthiacs, and private speeches – which would be good for keeping your hand in Greek. In addition to exercising your Greek, you can learn about 4th c. Greek history and Athenian politics and life in general from them, as long as you use an adequate commentary to expose his lies. Eventually you might tackle On the Crown. There are other Attic orators that are good material for Greek maintenance, as well as for learning about Athenian life.
But it’s true that maintaining one’ Greek requires a substantial investment of time and effort.
Hi, I doubt that Greek is higher maintenance than other languages, but you could only really determine this by scientific testing (e.g. comprehension tests run x years after people ceasing to learn various languages may give a rough indication).
It may well have been studied already: worth digging around. I wouldn’t trust self-reporting (which can be full of bias).
If your deeper question is about whether you’ll have the stamina to continue Greek in the long term, my recommendation would be to consider what factor(s) make you want to learn Greek now (a book? a documentary? etc.), and if you find your interest flagging at any point in the future, try pressing those same buttons again and see if your interest rekindles.
PS Bill just posted before me, as always with excellent advice: check out the list of authors he mentions in the last few paragraphs. I hope you find those names as awe-inspiring as I do! Imagine if you could read those authors in the original: a goal worth the investment.
There are many elements of the academic experience that lead people to overestimate their own level of Greek (or overestimate it to others). The first explanation for losing Greek would be: was the level that they lost really so high ever? Or, when it was “high,” did they have trouble reading without recourse to dictionaries with glosses for everything (not even general glosses, but prepared especially for the passages they were reading) and commentaries with translations for the hard bits, along with hand-wavy explanations? How was their Greek when they just sat down with a plain Greek text and without the aids? (Sitting down and reading the plain texts also happens to be the way to keep hold of any language, ancient or modern, of course.)
But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. I do think that Greek doesn’t stick as well to the tongue (“muscle memory”, though that’s not right as the brain is involved too) as well as Latin. My Greek is much better than my Latin, but the Latin is stickier. (Ditto for German. And Japanese. And Norwegian.) It’s easier to say a Latin phrase in a way that sounds sonorous and will stick in my head. What I suspect this is, is a serious problem with all of the various Greek pronunciations in use and a deficit in the current reconstructions.
To be clear, we’re talking about native speakers of a Romance language who think Latin easier to maintain than Greek? While native language transfer doesn’t account for everything in second language learning, it’s certainly relevant here. (As Chad already pointed out, self-reporting is unreliable.)
I use commentaries and a dictionary in reading Greek, and sometimes a translation as a check, instead of “sitting down and reading plain texts”.
I do that because, first and foremost, I like to make sure that I really understand what I’m reading – instead of coming away with an impressionistic and possibly mistaken feeling that I’ve understood.
And also because I need a certain amount of background information about texts written long ago in a very different culture. And I don’t know Greek history backwards and forwards; reading Greek historians and especially the orators without the corrective of commentaries gives a dangerously one-sided picture. Commentaries can also provide illumination on linguistic and literary matters that might have escaped me and point to connections with other passages in the same text or texts.
All of this enriches my experience of engaging with ancient Greek texts. But maybe the fact that I don’t have unlimited confidence in my ability to extract a full measure of meaning simply by “sitting down and reading plain texts” means that I really don’t have a good command of ancient Greek.
I started learning modern Greek in 1991 in preparation for our honeymoon and then reviewed it again when we did family trips ca. 2000 and 2003. By the last trip, I was at the point where I could start up some kind of limited conversation with a taxi driver, but reading a newspaper was difficult without a dictionary. I didn’t touch Greek again until 2021, when I started in on ancient Greek for the first time. My experience was that quite a bit of the modern Greek was still there, and a lot more came back once my memory started to get triggered. I started spontaneously recalling verb paradigms like αγαπώ in the present, as well as random lines from language tapes like τα κοκτέιλ, πρίγκιπες του καλοκαιριού (but the first time I dredged up that line, I remembered it with lots of grammatical errors).
I don’t think it’s realistic to imagine that the language would be on the tip of one’s tongue many years later, at the same level of fluency, without ever having touched it for a long time. That doesn’t mean it’s as if you’ve never studied it in the first place. Obviously regaining the level of mastery needed in order to teach the language will be more difficult.
Those are very good reasons to use commentaries and dictionaries. And translations too. The edifice of scholarship has piled up some real jewels. I use commentaries and dictionaries for the same reasons, though I now avoid them for the bulk of my reading. But the question at issue in this thread is not about personal enrichment, but “do they help your fluency or language retention?” My fear (and more than a fear) from commentaries/dictionaries/translations is that temporary enrichment from using a commentary for this one reading degrades my long-term enrichment from becoming more fluent.
Anyway, I created the random Greek passages thread as a thinly disguised unseens exam thread to allow everyone to demonstrate their raw language skills and show off the level that their methodologies have gotten them to. If your enrichment was real and long term, and not something illusory, it should find expression there. It will show up areas of skill as well as limitations to work on. Contribute some translations, and throw out a few challenges for me, and I’ll be happy to join in and make a fool of myself on them.
Lots of very wise comments and interesting points, thanks everyone for your responses.
I have to say this sounds a bit discouraging. My aim was to reach fluency in cursive reading, and I imagined that using a dictionary belonged to the stage before maintenance, i.e. learning Greek.
Is this an unrealistic goal?
Great advice, thank you!
I think their Greek was outstanding because they were all Khagne graduates (which requires a much higher level than the average classics graduate student after 3-4 years of full-time Greek). Here is an example of the kind of texts given for translation into French at the final exam, no dictionary allowed : https://www.ens.psl.eu/IMG/file/concours/2010/AL/sujet_epreuve_commune_ecrit_version_grecque.pdf
What I suspect this is, is a serious problem with all of the various Greek pronunciations in use and a deficit in the current reconstructions.
Do you mean that Greek can’t really be subvocalized because we don’t exactly know how to pronounce it, and as a result you lose the benefit of auditive memory?
Hi mikomasr, the practices that Hylander recommends above (study with commentaries, dictionaries and other resources) and Joel recommends (free reading without resources to train independent thinking through the text) are complementary (neither was recommending either of these exclusively, as I understand). When you get to a maintenance phase, you’ll do a mix of both: both are good for you. You’ll get to a stage (after a fair while) of being able to pick up a clean text and read it through without resources; then when you read with resources you will learn things you couldn’t have learned from the text itself, or things you missed. I find both rewarding.
Perhaps think (by way of analogy) of Roman veteran soldiers in the legions: sometimes they went into battle (cf. free reading); sometimes they drilled (cf. working through texts with resources); their overall skills came from this combination.
You will never outgrow the dictionary (nor should you want to!). I remember reading a well-known Vatican Latinist saying that he still consulted the dictionary regularly after learning Latin for 50+ years.
I don’t think that I would have understood that Euripides passage without aids a year or two ago. Not knowing the story, it took me several read-alouds just now to get it. A number of words I needed to make an educated guess about. I agree that it seems like a fairly high level examination (let’s ignore the exaggeration for a moment that my Greek is “high level”). On the other hand, I can’t really imagine losing my Greek at this point, so I find it strange that these people did.
Pronunciation instability could be a factor, but not really what I was getting at. In your native language, when a phrase is ugly or cacophonous, it’s harder to remember. For Greek I think all the current pronunciation schemes lend themselves to that ugliness and cacophony, and therefore retention difficulty.
One can believe one can read a text, when actually one thinks a meaning for the phrases and sentences, as the eyes run over them. For example, I’m studying Lysias #1 for the second time. The notes of my first effort show me that I now must solve again problems that I had solved the first time. I cannot recall even the experience of solving them, only a month ago. It feels like completely new learning.
I’m stretching to find a parallel of this in other fields of knowledge. Maybe one parallel is watching a math teacher trace the proof of a theorem, taking careful notes, and then later being unable to explain the same proof, even with the aid of the notes.
I think this kind of problem must be a stage in learning, that for me must be passed through on the road to mastery. I can imagine that classroom study might create the illusion of mastery, a result of all the little checkpoints provided by classroom study.
I wouldn’t be discouraged, learning any language requires hard work and persistance, and the acceptance that it is never really ‘learnt’ (even your mother tongue will confound you in the right circumstances). The difficulty with Greek seems to me two-fold.
Firstly, the texts we have are mostly in a very high literary tone, and so require close and focused reading. This is also true of your native language. For example, reading Shakesphere is not easy as such, and the brain needs a bit of time to get used it. I find if I don’t read ‘high brow’ writing for a while, my stamina to read it rapidly diminishes. Sadly, the Greeks didn’t leave us many trashy romance novels (though there are a few), and so whenever we pick up a text not only do we have the language to deal with, but it’s high brow style. On top of that, ‘Greek’ covers several millenia and fields, so the vocabulary you learn to read Homer is not going to help much when you try and read Plotinus or Xenephon.
The second issue, which jeidsath alludes to, is the speaking element. We don’t speak ancient Greek, and so we don’t drill it in as a language, forgetting that language is a practical spoken thing first and foremost, not a written thing. With hindsight, I wish I had learnt Greek by reading it out loud, but then there is the pronunciation battle. Once again, jeidsath is right, and the reconstructed Greek we have is probably not entirley accurate, and at any rate not entirley natural to us. The more I have learnt the language, the more I am coming around to the idea that in speaking it we should just used the modern demotik pronunciation. I can understand the bible Greek in church well enough, and that’s how they pronounce it.
bcrowell also hits on a good point not mentioned enough, which is related to the pronunciation issue. Not enough ancient Greek speakers learn modern Greek. I know it (passingly), but being around it all my life has helped my ancient Greek, and my ancient Greek has improved my modern. It is also the only modern language with a basis in ancient Greek. Of course Latin ‘sticks’ easier - the vocabulary of pretty much all western European languages is stuffed full of it.
Another thing to remember, and to not be disheartned by, is that the brain seems attuned to learn languages. I first tried Ancient Greek when I was 20ish, and stopped. But when I picked up over 10 years later, I was surprised to found how much had been retained. I am presently learning Russian again after a similar gap, and the speed with which it has come back is quite astounding - but in this case it helps that I have spoken it out loud a lot, and so it is properly drilled into the neural whatsits.
As an extreme contrast, I happened across something in French this morning, and although it’s been 25 years since I studied or used any French, I just cruised right through it. Here’s some of the text (by Axelle Neyrinck, https://hal.univ-reims.fr/tel-03199620/document ):
Il faut d’emblée poser, pour l’évacuer parce que ce n’est pas l’objet de cette étude, la question de l’historicité du massacre des Innocents. Certains auteurs tiennent que Matthieu a inventé ce récit de toute pièce et s’appuient sur trois arguments. Tout d’abord, le thème de la persécution de l’enfant prédestiné menaçant le roi régnant est un motif anthropologique universel. Ensuite, l’évangéliste lui-même indique l’origine biblique de son récit en expliquant son lien étroit avec la prophétie de Jérémie. Enfin, Flavius Josèphe († v. 100), historien judéen dont l’œuvre confirme l’historicité de certains passages de la Bible, ne fait nulle mention d’un massacre d’enfants ordonné par Hérode, alors qu’il s’étend par ailleurs longuement sur le caractère sanguinaire de celui- ci. Au contraire, les tenants de l’historicité du massacre des Innocents expliquent le silence de Flavius Josèphe par le fait que celui-ci, s’adressant à un public romain peu sensible au devenir des enfants en bas âge puisqu’habitué à l’exposition des enfants1, ne croit sans doute pas utile de mentionner la mort de six ou sept enfants dans la lointaine Palestine. Compte tenu en effet de la population supposée de la Judée sous domination romaine à cette époque, il est impossible que le massacre ait concerné plusieurs milliers d’enfants, comme le rapporte la tradition chrétienne. Le silence de Flavius Josèphe ne prouverait donc pas que le massacre de quelques-uns n’a pas eu lieu.
My point is not to brag about my French – it’s the opposite. My French is terrible. I only ever studied it casually. I can’t produce it to save my life, beyond the level of “Bonjour, comment allez vous?”
I don’t think my disproportionate ability to whiz through this text with good comprehension has anything to do with pronunciation. Actually, if I want to mentally pronounce the words of this passage, I have to slow down to a speed much slower than my reading speed. IMO the suggestions upthread that Greek comprehension would be better with an appropriate system of pronunciation are illogical and not based on any evidence.
I think what helps so much with French compared to Greek is not so much that there are a lot more cognates as that the cognates are a lot more transparent. Any passage from Homer is full of words that are recognizable cognates of English words, but they’ve undergone a huge amount of phonetic and semantic drift, and inflection also tends to hide what’s going on. So for instance Iliad 1.158 has ἑσπόμεθ ̓ ὄφρα σὺ χαίρῃς, “we follow so that you may rejoice.” Well, ἑσπόμεθα is cognate with English “sequel,” and they’re related by regular sound laws in Indo-European, but there’s no way anyone is going to figure that out at reading speed. And χαίρῃς is cognate with “eucharist,” but semantic drift means that you’d never intuitively make the leap from “eucharist” to “rejoice,” as opposed to many other possible semantic guesses, like “sharing,” “ceremony,” or “charisma.”
Due to the Norman invasion, English also has a ton of Franglaisisms, so a lot of the Romance idioms are easy because they correspond fairly closely to how the English idioms are constructed. In the French passage, I would imagine that this is the case for “en effet,” “de toute pièce,” and “sans doute.” These are probably no more or less inherently logical than the corresponding Greek idioms, but I’m guessing the Greek idioms are totally different than the Romance ones.
I would beg to differ, as English is in some ways (Norman) French with Germanic grammar, and our pronunciation isn’t a million miles from the French any way. For example, most of the vocab in the passage can fairly easily be related to English; Les enfants is not much different from ‘the infants’ as one example, and the ‘Franglaisisms’ you present also make the point. I don’t think any English speaker will be confused if you said ‘sans doute’. On top of that, French pronunciation is to some extent known, even if in parody, in most of the English speaking world.
My evidence for saying Greek comprehension would be improved by speaking it aloud either in reconstructed Attic or contemporary Demotic, is my own experience. Speaking a language activates the ‘linguistic’ neurons in a way that reading and writing it doesn’t. My Russian comprehension is significantly better due to my speaking it, and unlike French, it has very little in common with English. Similar is true of Greek, I find if I read it in Demotic pronunciation, or listen to my Dad read it out loud in Demotic (he doesn’t know the reconstructed, or Ancient Greek) it is suddenly much more comprehensible, which I put down to the fact that I have used Demotic Greek enough for it to be in the muscle memory.
I suspect that if we were to read that French passage aloud, as well as others, enough times, our ability to produce it spontaneously would dramatically improve.
Andriko, we may be talking past each other. What I said was, “IMO the suggestions upthread that Greek comprehension would be better with an appropriate system of pronunciation are illogical and not based on any evidence.” I was responding to this idea by Joel:
Your recent post seems to be defending the idea that producing a language orally helps with comprehension, which I wasn’t disputing.
I just don’t believe that, for example, a historically inaccurate pronunciation of upsilon somehow makes the language less euphonious and therefore harder to learn.
You’re quite right, bcrowell, I think we are at a slight cross purpose somewhere.
I think here I tend to agree with jeidsath (if I have understood your point correctly, ie. that reconstructed pronunciation is fine). I don’t think modern reconstructions of ancient pronunciation are necessarily helpful for learning the language. The Attic we ‘learn’ in the textbooks is only for a very specific time and place, and is at any rate itself inaccurate for that period, and attempts to use it in a spoken way just don’t feel very natural at all, which is why I have come around to the view we should all learn ancient Greek with Demotic pronunciation (at least for speaking purposes) which at any rate wouldn’t be so far off Koine anyway. The ‘Lucian pronunciation’ would probably be the best option for something more ‘historical’.
For me, Japanese is stickier than Greek. That’s surely nothing to do with degree of language relation, and much more to do with the chance to hear native speakers speaking euphonically.
My point was really meant to include modern pronunciations of ancient Greek along with the reconstructions. They are no better.
The least important thing about the different pronunciations, for euphony, is how one pronounces the vowels, even though that’s what 90% of the silly arguments are about. Rather, it’s the natural rhythm of the speech that is what is important above all, and that is unaffected by how your pronounce your upsilons.
The stickiest part of Greek speech is surely the poetry, and if the meter of the poetry doesn’t force itself on us when we read aloud, we haven’t got the rhythm right, and the language is not going to “stick” in the ear or on the tongue.
My point isn’t that reconstructed pronunciation is good or bad. Personally, I use Erasmian. I was just expressing my skepticism about what I take to be Joel’s claim: that one pronunciation system would be better or worse than another for helping words to stick in our memory. If Joel can develop that theory with facts and logic, and present it completely and clearly, that could be interesting, but I don’t think he’s done that so far.
