My Intro

Textkit Community Open Board
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Hey guys!

My name is Patrick, I am a software engineer, recently married with a newborn lol. My wife and I like to study theology and so that’s why I have an interest in learning Ancient Greek. I’d like to be able to read the Church Fathers and also Aristotle/Plato later on. I have a MS in Computer Science and BSs in Math and Computer Science. My wife and I are also Catholic and like to frequent the Latin Mass so we’d like to be able to follow along without the aid of a missal and also read church documents/saint writings in that language! The goal for both languages is to have a comfortable reading proficiency and I’d also like to be able to speak in Modern Greek as well if I can kill “two birds with one stone.” I’m an absolute beginner in Greek and a beginner in Latin. I am also fairly fluent in Spanish which helps in both languages. My wife and I also sing in the choir at Latin Mass which helps with pronunciation and overall exposure. We also practice the Latin chant every day (time permitting, has been a little more hectic with a newborn but getting there lol) and try to get to daily Mass, so we have a lot of exposure to Latin locked in right now. Main focus has been trying to get solid and flexible (in terms of time) resources and help in Greek. I would also like to expose our son to as much of all four languages (English, Latin, Greek, and Spanish) as possible so he can be a polyglot from an early age and won’t have the struggles us adults can have. The phonetics of Spanish and Greek are pretty much the same so talking to him in Spanish should be sufficient at this age but I would like to acquire resources for later as well and work on my Greek fluency so when he’s a little older we’ll be able to impart the knowledge.

Right now the core resources I’m using are audio & photo Anki flashcards (being a programmer I’m able to easily generate tts from Amazon, Google etc), Youtube for supplemental listening, Memrise and Duolingo for general grammar and that’s about it. We also own a copy of Lingua Latina for Latin which is a useful resource. I’ve heard getting a foot into Modern Greek since it has more resources can make learning Ancient Greek a lot easier but not sure about that, so feedback on that would be nice. Since I don’t always have a lot of time to spare one strategy I’m trying to do is amass a LOT of vocab at once since there’s always time for a couple new flashcards. Anyway now I’m ranting. Glad to be a member and look forward to being part of the community!

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Greetings and welcome! If you search the forum, you’ll find plenty of discussion on resources for both Latin and Greek for the self-learner. I’ll only say here that if your goal is to learn to read ancient Greek, start with ancient Greek. While a native speaker of modern Greek has a definite starting advantage in learning ancient Greek, it’s always better otherwise to start in the target language rather than to have another step in between.

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I’ve heard getting a foot into Modern Greek since it has more resources

I’d say that’s a very dubious proposition (the more resources part). As to the efficacy of learning modern Greek as a second language as an indirect path to learning ancient Greek, you can find a lot of debate about that, including in the archives of Textkit (I know there’s at least one excellent thread on that, but apologies, I’m too lazy to do the search myself), but I believe the majority of non-Greeks would agree with Barry (and me): Go right to the ancient Greek. Especially since, in your case, you’re probably biting off more than you can chew anyway!

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Welcome to Textkit, Patrick!
I’m not a native speaker of Modern Greek, but I’ve been speaking it since the age of ten, therefore 58 years. I just want to back up what Barry and Randy think about learning Modern Greek as a possible stepping stone to Ancient Greek. You’ll find that in the case of Modern Greek, the pronunciation is different, the vocabulary, although evolved from Ancient Greek, is often quite different and the grammar, specifically the morphology, has been simplified over time. Here is one recent thread with more thoughts on the subject:
http://discourse.textkit.com/t/modern-vs-ancient-greek/17146/1

You’ve set some great goals and you’ll find the journey a long one, but well worth the trip!

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Thank you all for the responses! I will search around for similar threads on the Modern Greek front. Definitely helpful and don’t want to waste time so y’all’s input is appreciated :slight_smile: