Although I studied Greek in college many years ago, when I decided to learn Greek again I was pretty much starting from scratch. A friend recommended the Italian Athenaze, which I love. As I work my way through the second volume, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about what to do after I finish. Since Athenaze ends with some readings from the Acharnians, I thought it might be good to continue. The fact that the play has features of “old” Old Comedy was appealing. I bought the play. In fact I bought it three times. First I bought a 1901 school edition by Merry. A prior owner had noted that the text had been bowdlerized. Sure enough, lines are missing. I wanted a text with everything. Then I bought a print-on-demand copy of the Starkie edition produced by BiblioLife. Unlike many of the copies of out of print books, the reproduction job was very good. Not a touch of blurriness. Also Starkie’s edition has a wonderful layout with notes on each page like the new intermediate books. Unfortunately, the size of the font of the notes is beyond my comfort level, so I ended up buying an original copy which was comparable in price to the reproduction. I knew that I wanted to read it eventually, if not immediately after finishing Athenaze.
I had, in passing, considered other options such as going right into Herodotus and also considered (and bought) Lucian’s ‘On the Syrian Goddess’ before I decided that it made more sense for me to focus on Attic Greek for a while. Recently I discovered Textkit and have been avidly reading old topics. I considered, for example, the suggestion to read ‘Salamis in Easy Attic Greek’. To me it wasn’t easy. Finally poking around I found Claxton’s Attica, and immediately knew that that was the book for me. It has been mentioned on Textkit, but not a lot. My experience learning by myself has left me with a lot of questions about “why”. Why is the word order so strange? What’s the meaning/purpose of this particle? Looking inside “Attica” on Amazon convinced me that Claxton has the answers I’m looking for.
And then I watched a couple of Stephen Krashen lectures at the suggestion of posters. He’s pretty convincing and reminded me of my personal experience with Spanish. One summer I decided to read ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ without using a dictionary. Once I broke down and looked at a translation. The flying carpet really was flying. So I went back to my methodology. Don’t worry if you can’t understand a sentence. Don’t worry if you can’t understand a paragraph. If you can’t understand three paragraphs in a row, there’s a problem. Quite surprisingly to me, I learned the meaning of words without knowing the English translation. And if I asked myself the meaning of certain words in Spanish, I decided “it’s complicated”. Depending on the use, you’d have to translate the word in different ways.
Needless to say the distance between words in Greek and words in English is greater. ‘ἄγω’, for example. It applies to a slave or a wife and means more than “lead”. There could be big benefits to reading Greek without attempting to translate. But what sort of Greek text could I read without a dictionary and without worrying about not understanding whole sentences? Quite accidentally I ran across “The Ephesian Tale”. Hadavas’s book cover is wonderful. Reading a synopsis of the plot I realized that so much was happening that if I didn’t understand a paragraph or two, it wouldn’t matter. Nor would I have to worry about forms, nuances, etc. Unlike my work with Athenaze, where I feel a need to understand everything, the Ephesian Tale should be pure, wonderful trash reading.
So, both ‘Attica’ and ‘Ephesian Tale’ are on order (along with the ‘Dialogues of the Sea Gods’). Claxton is for after I finish Athenaze, but I’m going to try my technique on the ‘Ephesian Tale’ and see what happens.
Mark
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