In page 60 of “First Greek Book” John. W. White listed the case endings of the consonant declensions, at the paragraph with the heading 240.
My question is about the ones in the part of his table about singular cases, where there is only a long line or the long line is listed as an additional option beside -s in the case of the masculine and feminine consonant declension nouns.
What does that long line stand for? For me to leave the noun as is?
You seem to be jumping around from book to book. You are only going to make progress if you stick to one book and work through it.
The presentation here is pretty confusing for a beginner. A long line must indicate no addition of the ending. But without examples I expect this will not be helpful.
shrugs
I’m switching between Athenaze and First Greek Book alternately in an attempt to make breakthroughs somewhere. It’s kind of starting to happen in starts and fits. But yeah, it’s crazy.
With John. W. White, you really have no answer key to look at. With Athenaze, there is an answer key, the grammar parts help but the others…
I dont know what to make of your reply but I dont think its conducive to getting future help.
Its up to you whether you want to make any progress. Switching around is not going to help you. White is a very old textbook designed for classroom use when learning by rote was the normal approach. Athenaze is a modern textbook with helpful explanations if you read it carefully.
You should not be looking for breakthroughs. Learning a language involves patient application There is no magic bullet.
Malo,
Seneca’s absolutely right about sticking to one textbook. There are quite a number of textbooks that can be used to teach a given subject. Each textbook will be more or less different in several ways. It may have a different target group of learners (grammar school children vis a vis university students or autodidacts). It may present the material in a slightly different order depending on what reading selections are augmenting the grammar and vocabulary lessons (or vice versa). It may be written more clearly or written using more “modern” language. It may employ vastly different teaching methods (think grammar-translation vs. structural-functional, etc.) The point is that although the subject material as a whole is the same, it can be presented in different ways and in a different order. Decide which way suits your needs best (Is it written in language you can understand? Is the information presented in small enough chunks that you can retain it? Does it retain your interest? Is it fun?), then commit to that course. Otherwise, you’re just sampling and no real learning is taking place.
…ok.
I’ll have a soul searching and decide which of the two books I really want to continue on. They both have pros and cons for me.
Malo,
Perhaps no book will ever completely satisfy your requirements, but some will get closer than others in fulfilling your expectations. Right now, in your case I think I’d stick with Athenaze. You’ve put in a fair bit of work in it already. In the end, you’ll acquire enough knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and syntax to be able to start reading relatively easy unadapted texts and with reading will come exposure to more advanced constructions and as you master those, new authors will open up for you and someday, if you’ve done the work, you’ll be reading Thucycides and Aeschylus and Sophocles and Aristophanes and cherishing every word! It’s a long journey, but those who have made it never regret it.
…ok. After a lot of thinking and looking through both book, I have a question regarding Athenaze.
In Athenaze there are all these exercises that prompt you, the learner, to write down the Greek sentences first and start labelling which word is a subject, ok linking verb, so on and so forth BEFORE you can even translate the sentences.
Because I didn’t see the answers to that in the teacher’s manual, which just gives the translations, can I just ignore all those parts and just translate straight away and generally follow instructions to exercises as best as I can, especially in parts where faithfully following the instructions on the textbook leads one into, well…giving partially incorrect answers compared to the ones in the teacher’s handbook?
That is what drove me crazy 2 chapter’s worth of exercises into Athenaze.
This is an exercise to make you think of the syntax of the sentence before you start translating. Only by working out first of all how a sentence works can you hope to make a translation. Translation is the last part of the process.
If you “just translate” you will never learn greek. You will look at a sentence decide what you think it means and try to fit the greek to that. The other process of understanding the syntax of a sentence first is the only way which works.
After a while and with practice understanding the syntax as a first step will become natural and you will hardly think of it. But you have to learn how to do that first.
Malo,
I’m afraid my edition is the one just prior to yours (mine’s the “revised” edition, which was published in 1990). I don’t see any specific instruction to label each part of a sentence before you translate it, but that process of labelling which is also called “parsing”, is an essential mental tool for understanding and translating any sentence. We even do it in our native languages. I’m sure you remember doing it in grammar school and high school. The difference is that in our native languages, we’ve listened, read and spoken the language more or less correctly from an early age, so identifying the various parts of a sentence in our native language is fairly easy. When you tackle a new language, whether it be German or French or Latin or Attic Greek, you go through the same process. It is a very important tool in Greek, because Greek relies on inflection instead of word order to show the relationship between the various words in the sentence. As you build your knowledge of case endings and verb endings, you’ll find that “parsing” becomes almost automatic. It is a skill you really can’t start soon enough. Let’s take as an example the caption in Chapter 3(α):
ὁ μὲν Δικαιόπολις ἐλαύνει τοὺς βοῦς, οἱ δὲ βόες τὸ ἄρητρον ἕλκουσιν.
article particle noun verb article noun article particle noun article noun verb
masc. nom. 3rd per masc. masc. masc. masc. neuter neuter 3rd. per
nominative. masc. sing. accusative acc. nom. nom. acc/nom. acc or pl. sing. sing. pres.ind. plural pl. pl. pl. sing. nom. sg. pres.ind.
Now everything that’s in that table you know. You’ve learnt these forms in the first two chapters. You also know that:
ὁ - this definite article is going to be paired with a noun in the nominative case.
μέν is a particle in your vocabulary that is paired with δε, meaning in this case “on one hand…on the other” or sometimes simply translates as “and”
Δικαιόπολις - nouns in the nominative case usually denote the subject of the sentence.
ἐλαύνει - is the action being performed by the subject
τούς - this definite article is going to be paired with a noun in the accusative case.
βοῦς - nouns in the accusative normally indicate the object of the verb.(There are other uses of the accusative, but this is what you need to know for now)
οἱ - this definite article is going to be paired with a plural masculine noun in the nominative case.
δε - the other half of the μεν…δε construction
βόες - plural masculine nominative noun, probably another subject.
τὸ - this definite article is neuter and can be either nominative or accusative singular. We don’t know yet which one it’ll be, so let’s just carry on…
ἄρητρον - neuter noun, could be nom. or acc. sing. we’ll see.
ἕλκουσιν - is another action performed by another subject, in this case we know the subject is plural, because the verb makes the 3rd person plural. Remember seeing any plural subjects? We also know from the vocabulary that ἔλκουσιν is a transitive verb meaning to pull or drag. It’s got to be pulling something, so there must be an accusative noun. See any candidates?
In the end, you end up with S V O, and then S O V. Now you can put an English sentence together that fully reflects the meaning of the Greek and I’m betting you get it in one!
How much of this should you write down on paper? Enough to remember it.
EDIT: I see Seneca’s already given you an answer, but I’ll post this so that you can have an example of the process.
In my experience, jumping around in textbooks is fine and useful especially for a self-learner. I avoided parsing like the plague in reading, though I drilled on forms separately until they were all easily recognizable. One of the hardest things in learning Greek – or other languages, in my experience – has always been sensitizing myself to the important bits in the flow. Anything that breaks up the flow, I avoid. The idea is to get out there on the water and try to balance on the surfboard. Of course, I’m still learning the language, myself.
I suggest having one principal book through which you work. Athenaze is excellent, if for no other reason that it gives you fairly long sections of Greek to read in each chapter. However, having a few other texts available for reference can also be a good thing. If something is unclear to you in one text, check the others to see if their explanations and examples are helpful to you. But only systematically work through one.
Malo,
I’ll confess that I’m not much of a debater, so I’m going to leave it to other better qualified individuals to comment on the approach above. I’ll only say that although the method I’m strongly suggesting to you is perhaps a little more traditional, it has produced many fine classicists. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide as a self-learner how you want to proceed. If at some point, you find yourself frustrated with your progress, however, then try the “old fashioned” way. It has worked for others and can work for you.
I will say that I see nothing wrong in looking at another textbook when you’re stumped and you need an alternative explanation that might make more sense to you, the same way that you come to Textkit when you need help. This use of other textbooks should supplement your program of instruction, however, not replace your primary textbook and in the case of Ancient Greek that whatever books you look at focus on the dialect you’re learning (Attic, as opposed to Epic (Homer),Ionic (Herodotus),Koine (New Testament)). As to flow, if I take the meaning correctly, there is no doubt that this is an important part of the process of reading and learning. Eventually, you have to be able to trace the chain of events in a history, or the logical sequence of ideas in a argument or just be able to follow the plot in a story in order to gain understanding and develop new insights. I think this process can only take place after you’ve learned the meaning and relationship of each word in a sentence, each sentence in a paragraph, each chapter in a book.
Why turn this into a debate at all, Aetos? All we can give is our personal experiences. (Something more useful than advice, by far.) This “oneitis” about the one true language learning methods is a virus that I wish we could lockdown.
I’ve noticed these threads tend to end up like three priests arguing about the best way to reach heaven while the original poster wanders off and becomes a Buddhist.
A fourth priest speaks: For me the major benefit of working through a single book was the sense of achievement I got from finishing it. After I finished the truly, truly appalling (but delightfully illustrated) “Teach Yourself Greek” by F. Kinchin Smith, I was puffed up with pride, unbearably smug, an 18 year old living his best life. Going through a second introductory textbook later on was a pleasure because I’d already covered the material, even if I didn’t remember everything from the first time round. They all get you to about the same level. As always with languages, the more time you spend doing it and the less time you spend planning how to do it, the faster you’ll improve.
Very well said.
Naturally I agree with Barry and Aetos. That doesn’t invalidate other approaches. We all speak from our own experience.
Its meant to be fun just pick something you like the look of and enjoy it.
Joel,
Sean and Seneca have put it far better than I can, but really whatever advice I give is based on personal experience, i.e. what has worked best for me.
I apologise for this- there was no need for this statement. Bit thoughtless on my part.
I don’t see what you have to apologise for. Your contributions are always thoughtful. We have too many pointless trips round this topic and I thought you were simply gently trying to forestall another excursion.
Thank you, Seneca. I appreciate your kind words and you are quite right as to my motivation. In retrospect, though I wish I hadn’t led with that particular statement. It did nothing to help Malo and that’s really what this thread is about: helping a young person find his or her way in what must seem especially in the beginning to be a daunting task.