I’m dealing with several different Greek texts now: Mastronarde’s adapted-Greek exercises, the topics I look up in Morwood, Plato’s Apology of Socrates, and the gospel of John.
With the aid of a NT lexicon, I’m making out John, and getting some good practice with pronouns. The sentences are simple and straightforward, the lexicon nearly always parses the words, and I have some familiarity with the text in English. I started doing one verse each morning, and soon increased my quota to two. I’m now trying to do three or four verses each day. I don’t know enough Greek to worry about Greek in the Bible vs. Attic Greek.
Plato’s Apology is much more difficult, due to the long sentences and the new-to-me words. Because of this I’ve set no quota, and instead just work on it a little each day.
I believe it’s helpful to read some unadapted material along with the adapted material in the textbook. It provides a preview of the challenges to come, and demonstrates the usefulness of learning the inflections.
I have in paperback form both Smyth and the abridged Liddell and Scott as well as Usher’s Outline of Greek Accidence.
I have also been reading Plato and John whilst going through Mastronade (and also Morewood at times).
I think it’s a very good combination - Plato seems to me to be not that hard once you have some vocabulary, and the Apology is quite pacy and funny. I’ve been using Helm though, so have help easy to hand.
As for John, I have been reading it (and the whole bible in bits) without help from the beggining, and generally refusing to use a dictionary as well. The fact that I ‘know’ so many quotes form the bible helps a lot, I’ve enjoyed having to just work it all out - and as you’ve noticed, John (infact all of the Johanine books) is quite simple, and diligently rereading parts slowly pulls the veil back.
For the time being, I’ve set Plato aside. Although I can usually make out some of the structure of a sentence, it’s dreary to have to look up so many words, and my command of the inflections is too weak. So I’ll stick with the gospel of John and Mastronarde for a while.
With every chapter Mastronarde presents translation problems designed to evoke review of grammar points in the present chapter, and in previous chapters. My method is to write down every sentence, and parse every word of each sentence. When stumped, I resort to the Perseus word-study tool, which I have bookmarked in my browser.
I’d love to have a “500 Greek verbs” book like those available for French and Latin, but I can’t find one.
Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods or Xenophon’s Anabasis are easier than the Apology.
When you are first starting out, you’re looking for texts that have lots of repetition and are not too tightly packed. Ideally, something that you could still read if someone blew away parts of the page with a shotgun. Plato’s Apology does not fit this, though some of his dialogues do. John is better, but I wouldn’t recommend it myself because there are too many sections where it’s difficult to tell what the author really means even if you understand the words perfectly. Mark is far better than John, in my opinion, though you may find that the Greek of the Gospels doesn’t really open up much of other Greek for you, unlike the classics.
Here are the word from the first paragraph of the Anabasis that are worth looking up. They’ll stick in your mind when re-reading because they are fundamental to the meaning. Looking up non-critical words is wasted time, because they won’t stick in your memory at this point.
On John: when I can’t decide what John really means, I have two things to fall back on. First is years of hard time in Sunday School, which gave me an understanding of what many Protestants think they ought to think it means. The other is, when something doesn’t make sense to me, I just assume the author had material he wanted to get in, and put it in this place, for want of a better place. Several instances of Jesus’s replies to other persons seem like this.
Lucian and Xenophon look good too.
On the Apology: that’s exactly what I experienced: too many new words, too many difficult contexts, too much grammar to look up. So I fell back and regrouped on Mastronarde. The scope of the puzzles is more limited.
The gospels of Mark and John were probably the first texts I read in Greek, much easier than any classical text. Mark is probably a bit easier, but everyone I know finds John more interesting. After these I attacked Homer.
I think the Anabasis of Xenophon and the Apology by Plato are both rather easy as far as classical prose texts go, but then again there isn’t really such a thing as an easy classical prose text, so you might well start with those. They say that later authors like Lucian who imitate the classical style are easier than the ”real thing”, but I have never read him myself.
I’d love to have a “500 Greek verbs” book like those available for French and Latin, but I can’t find one.
Hi Hugh. I don’t know of that specifically. Here are some possibilities, though. I’m passing them on not because I recommend or don’t recommend them, only that I happen to have them on my shelf.
Greek Vocabulary and Idiom: For Higher Forms. This has three parts. Part One, drama vocabulary; Part Two, prose vocabulary; Part Three, idioms. This lists in parts one and two are alphabetical.
Lexique nouveau de la langue grecque. Greek to French. This one uses my personally preferred method, vocabulary by topic. Namely, six broad themes (anthropos, scenes of private life, scenes of social life, scenes of political life, scenes of cultural life, kosmos) and under each, sub-themes. It also has useful appendices.
Lucian can present challenges as any ancient author. I don’t know about “easier,” but he’s certainly fun and entertaining (full disclosure, I did my MA thesis on his De Morte Peregrini).
