I’m writing up a quick summary of my return to Coptic, in case it’s useful to anyone now or in the future.
I went through Lambdin’s textbook about 7 years ago, then fought my way through a couple gnostic texts before moving on to other things. I’ve been planning to pick it up again, and recently did so.
Here’s my process.
- I began with an Anki deck that I believe was created as part of Christian Casey’s online classes, based on Lambdin’s textbook. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2084545297
- After a few days of drilling vocabulary, I started working through Lambdin, reading and doing the exercises for 1 (but sometimes 2 or even 3) chapters in a day. I was on vacation for most of this time, and worked at the pace of someone who had some memories that could be revived - I definitely wasn’t learning totally from scratch.
- I watched one of Christian Casey’s online classes based on Lambdin every day. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc8zI_lPZZrXWx34amS-nhViV6MHkl489. This was very useful - lots of interesting tidbits, it helped my pronunciation (still poor, I’m sure, but better than it would have otherwise been), and it let me attempts all of the exercises again.
- Having finished Lambdin (not even 2/3rds of the way reviewing it through Christian Casey’s classes, though), I’m now working through the Gospel according to Luke - Lambdin includes a nicely annotated version of the opening, but I’m also using the version on the Coptic Scriptorium and on this ios app (which lets me display Coptic & Greek side by side - very useful for me): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/coptic-bible/id1555182007
- This all went very quickly, but that’s because a) my Greek is pretty good b) I’ve been through Lambin before, even if it has been about 7 years, c) I was mostly on vacation and d) I’m undergoing a medication shift that limited my physical activity but not my mental activity. It was certainly fun to work at this pace, whether or not I ever do such a thing again.
My self-analysis is that my previous attempt to learn Coptic (primarily for the Nag Hammadi texts, although Coptic is inherently interesting, I must say) was hard to sustain because the Nag Hammadi texts aren’t very suitable for beginners. Therefore my plan is to spend some time with the gospels (and other easy texts? - I’m interested in suggestions, but will definitely review other posts) to build up my reading skills, and also to go through Allen’s grammar of Coptic dialects, since I’m sure that the dialectical characteristics of the Nag Hammadi texts added to my problems. In a few months I hope to begin working on the gnostic texts in parallel with easier Coptic texts.