Recently started, many questions

Greek Learning Greek
1

Hello,

I’m supposed to create a topic here, yeah? I was going to post one in the learning Greek forum, but since I’m supposed to post here first, I’ll just post here and copy paste later (if necessary.)

I’ve been studying Greek recently. Even more recently, I’ve been studying how to study Greek. The basic battleplan is looking like this, so far, not necessarily in chronological order:

  1. Grammar rules/terms
  2. Index cards (organizing vocabulary and terms by type. Nouns, verbs, and so on.)
  3. Gather non-biblical, non-philosophical, non-fictional reference texts for reading (This is to learn how to read/interpret without a denominational bias, while minimizing absorption of Greek philosophy. I can’t currently prove it, but I wonder if Bible colleges teach a biased version of Greek. This is also why I’d prefer to learn Attic Greek before Koine.)
  4. Build a pronunciation rubric! I’m currently looking at modern or reconstructed. Found out a local pastor knows Greek, going to find out what he uses since I think speaking and hearing is especially useful for learning a new language.
  5. Find more learned people to talk/write to.
  6. Find music for rules/pronunciations? I get songs stuck in my head really easily, so replacing all the garbage I used to listen to with songs about declensions sounds absolutely ideal. Plus, in the long term, I want to be able to teach children and draw them away from televisions. Direct engagement and music seems to help.
  7. By singing and pronouncing Greek, I hope to be able to think in Greek.

I’m also looking into classical Hebrew, possibly Latin and a living language (further down the road.) For now, Attic Greek and Classical Hebrew are my goals, but I want to learn them apart from the Bible, so I can read theBible with less bias and greater understanding.

Disadvantages I currently face:
Using a tablet, so many Greek characters do not display. I counter this by watching YT lectures and downloading .PDFs of older books.
No job, so no money, so no physical books. Tablets seem to cause eye fatigue more than books. Going from a backlit screen to a book is like going from a desert to an oasis.

Advantages:
Currently, no job and no close friends, so a tooooon of free time
Obsessive nature. When I get into something, it’s not unusual for me to spend 4+ hours reading about/practicing it. And words (vocab, mainly,) are an ollllld obsession.

I’ve also made a list of .PDFs I’ve downloaded. Once I have a job, I’d like to print a few of them up for easier reading. However, I think I need to stick to one or three of them sooner, rather than later. Optimization of time is something I’d like to make use of, as I’ve essentially wasted the last 14 years of my life drinking, doing drugs, and generally doing nothing good.

Here’s the book list, please feel free to give suggestions on which books to read. Listed also is the cost to print at 10 cents/page, in USD values:
HWS Greek Grammar - 79.9
JWW 1st Greek Book - 36.2
LG Kelly 25 Centuries of Language Teaching - 49.2
Ted Hildebrandt Mastering NT Greek - 52.1 (Ehhh, only because of the workbook existing. Hesitant because it’s “NT Greek” and not Attic.)
Mastering NT Greek Workbook - 42.2
NT in Original Greek (Byzantine textform, 2005) - 61.9
Samuel Green Intro to NT Greek - 12.8 (tempted by this just because it’s short so I can get started quicker, but I’ve also learned quicker isn’t always better. And again, “NT Greek” suggests to me that I’ll be learning a biased version of Koine.)
Gesenius Hebrew Grammar - 48.6
Dead Sea Scrolls - English : 80.4

If anyone can help me (especially if you have spare textbooks you can send for free, or you have a decade+and spare time,) it would be greatly appreciated. Especially especially if you are very familiar with Attic Greek.

Also, if anyone here can recommend a similar forum for Hebrew, that would be wonderful. Super long-term goals are to be able to read DSS and various codices in their original language.

On teaching yourself Ancient Greek
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RE: Hebrew forum

b-Hebrew
http://biblicalhumanities.org/bhebrew/viewforum.php?f=8&sid=ca60e4c101930fa2f58400eefe9fa80f

I haven’t posted to b-Hebrew in well over a decade. So I am out of touch with what goes on there. They have a beginners forum. So does b-greek, the other half. The atmosphere in these places is often not conducive to encouraging beginners. I seen over and over again, new people show up and after a few weeks or months they disappear and are never heard from again.

RE: resources online

I think (not sure) STEP Bible (free everywhere) has a version particularly intended for portable devices. That was their goal, to run on any platform. I currently using the STEP Bible while studying Coptic, I can display the SBLGNT and three versions in Coptic in one window.

stepbible.org

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Thank you for the link to b-hebrew!

I forgot I also have Jannaris’ Historical Greek Grammar.

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ἀπόλλυται

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Welcome to the forum.

You will find many suggestions here about how you should or shouldnt learn Greek in a particular way. People have different strategies for learning reflecting the diversity of their aims and interests.

If your first aim is to read attic group then I suggest you find one textbook like Athenaze, JACT reading Greek or Mastronade’s austere but thorough Introduction to Attic Greek. This latter book is supplemented by on line tutorials here http://atticgreek.org/.

Learning Greek like learning anything requires discipline and perseverance. Regular study is more important than amassing extensive resources. Once you have worked your way through a text book graduate to simple texts. For example once you have started book 2 of Athenaze you could start reading Lysias 1.

I have seen many people on these forums who want to run before they can walk. If you build strong foundations Greek isnt all that hard. If you dont learn the morphology and syntax as you go it seems like an uncoordinated mess and you will get nowhere. There is a lot to learn especially if your ambition is to teach. Unfortunately there is no quick fix and no way you can avoid memory work.

So my advice is choose one book (its not that crucial which one in my view) and work through it.

I get the impression that you have little experience in highly inflected languages. If you know no Latin but are interested in learning it might be a good idea to start with that language and say six months later begin Greek. Its a tall order to learn Greek and Latin on your own. Adding Hebrew seems very brave.

Ask whatever you like on the forum someone will usually try to help.

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There’s some good advice here. To begin with, I’d second the recommendation that if you have any interest in learning Latin to study that language first. If there’s a Greek textbook as good (and as cheap) as Wheelock’s Latin I never found it. Starting as a complete beginner with Mastronarde seems like a recipe for failure to me. Athenaze gets good reviews, and it was effective for me the month or two of a course I took, but is expensive (two volumes + two teacher’s guides + two workbooks, if you want them, and more practice can never hurt). I don’t know anything about the other books.

The biggest piece of advice I can give is to slow down. If you keep up your current pace before even beginning your studies you’re destined to crash once the initial enthusiasm wears off. Pick out a text and set aside however long works for you – an hour, maybe more, maybe less – from the day and stick to that and make it a habit. You want your studies to be a cigar, not a cigarette. If you’re just recently quitting drinking make sure that you’re not replacing one obsession with another, as one might consider such an amassing of materials. (ed: that’s not to say your desire to learn is insincere; rather, you’re in a spot now where you really need to be self-aware, and recognizing if you’re overdoing things or wasting energy is part of that.)

Even if you’re unemployed I’d still recommend picking out a fairly short time of the day: first, because there’s only so much you can learn or absorb in one day and spending more time can lead to diminishing returns and potentially frustration or a feeling of mental saturation; second, so that once you get a job it doesn’t seem like such a daunting thief of free time leaving little opportunity to study. Vocabulary takes some time to memorize and will take learning outside of that hour or so a day; I use flash cards that I can take anywhere I go.

In short, being disciplined, consistent, and persistent will pay off, and if you’re successfully getting sober you should have the mental fortitude. Don’t hesitate to ask questions.

(speaking for myself, I pronounce the accents as stresses. It’s very hard to be consistently right with Greek pronunciation; if you’re pronouncing chi, phi, and theta as fricatives – which is far easier than aspirates – you’ve already messed up.)

(I’m only on my first Greek work – Xenophon’s Anabasis – myself but I’ve had some success with Latin and this is based on my self-study as a whole)

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I’m confused as to how you’re deriving the price labels on the books you list. Smyth’s Greek Grammar should cost much less than $80; my used hardcover copy was $10 and the paperback editions seem to go for $20-$30. While I’m not familiar with the other books, I’d imagine they also cost much less. Regardless, Smyth won’t be of any value until you’ve completed the year-long intro sequence to Greek.

For Greek textbooks, I don’t recommend Athenaze. As swtwentyman said, it’s expensive, but on top of that I think that its general approach to teaching Greek is flawed. The concept of learning the language from reading their passages seems fine, but in the process you will end up missing many important grammatical points. It does have exercises to supplement the readings, but the concepts are not laid out well. The fact that it’s divided into two volumes also makes it annoying to look up a grammatical point when you’re working on a reading or exercise. On top of that, the newest edition has a lot of typos.
On the other hand, a book like Hansen & Quinn’s Greek: An Intensive Course, while often mind-numbingly boring, is much better in its approach, since it will force you to learn the grammatical concepts through repetition. My intro to Greek course was based on Athenaze, but I’ve only been getting the hang of the language since I’ve started dedicating time to Hansen & Quinn. I am not familiar with books like Mastronarde’s Introduction to Attic Greek or Groton’s Alpha to Omega but they seem to follow the H&Q model more than Athenaze does.

Also, swtwentyman makes a good point about allotting only a limited amount of your time to learning the language. If you try to dedicate more than 1-2 hours in a day to a book like Hansen & Quinn, you will drive yourself crazy and probably quit altogether out of frustration. Do one unit at a time and don’t move onto a new unit until you can do the exercises and drills with ease. I know I’m not allowed to post copyrighted material here, but last I checked there were scans of H&Q online. You might be interested in this video series that follows H&Q, produced by Leonard Muellner with the Center for Hellenic Studies: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq5ea-jR9u2puDaLoRL-nBkpwrkURbLjT

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RE: Tagged Texts

Tagged-texts are used widely by students of NT greek. An application that includes tagged texts of both the Greek NT and Hebrew Bible is often a requirement for taking biblical language courses. Tagged texts aid the student in getting over the hurdle of morphology. Memorizing tables is useful but what you need to accomplish to actually read is the ability to bypass the analytical step of parsing and just immediately grasp the meaning of a clause without the having to mentally parse everything.

History of Tags
In the old days, tagged texts were published in hard copy. For example Analytical Greek New Testament (Friberg & Friberg) and four volumes of Owens for the Hebrew MT. Owens is a hybrid, looks like a lexicon in canonical order and includes glosses from BDB (lexicon) and page # for BDB. Friberg (hard copy, 1st ed) is a UBSGNT3 with tag codes under each word. No glosses, just parsing tags very abbreviated for example NGMS noun genitive masculine singular. With the advent of hypertext the hardcopy has become irrelevant.

BTW, Martin Abegg and Roy Brown were conspiring together 25 years ago to produce a tagged version of the DSS.


MA: I met Dr. Roy Brown (creator of Accordance) in Nov. of 1991 at a Mexican restaurant in Kansas City while there for SBL. I had known of his “Perfect Word,” and “Mac Bible” and he was in the early stages of writing new software to take advantage of the morphologically tagged Hebrew databases that were just then becoming available. I began “tagging” my text files and working with Roy to use Accordance to search them. It was several years before we released my data. Roy invested 100s of hours as we both worked out the bugs in both my data and Accordance itself.


Interview with Martin G. Abegg on Electronic Dead Sea Scrolls
http://brianwdavidson.com/2013/09/20/interview-with-martin-g-abegg-on-electronic-dead-sea-scrolls/

I had been using a tagged version of the LXX for several years (CATSS LXX Univ. Pennsylvania) when I singed on with the Gramcord Inst. to beta test Accordance 0.8 in the fall of '93.

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@ MarkAntony198337 »

Thank you! Looks like I’ll only have to change a few small things in my pronunciation. Yay!

That’s a whole lotta practice. I’m reading Anabasis (the very first part of book one) out loud to work on pronunciation. The breathing/accent marks are a lot of fun! Kinda like a really primitive musical notation. Though i thought grave meant to lower pitch. That makes things a little easier. :slight_smile:

by seneca2008 » Thu Jun 02, 2016 10:54 am

I was considering Athenaze in the longer term because it’s a story, iirc. I’ve read a few threads, Mastronade seems to get a fair bit of praise. Still debating between just studying grammar terms and vocab until I can manage to get a book, though.

So textbook, then Anabasis or similar? How hard is Herodotus, comparatively?

I was considering doing nouns>verbs>common irregular verbs plus just reading aloud to become familiar with the alphabet until I could settle on a particular text. It’s so hard to be patient, but eh. Long haul, yeah?

Your impression is correct! However, I’d prefer to do Greek+Hebrew, then consider Latin. It’d be nice if I could throw in a simple living language in between Greek and Hebrew, but yeah… Too much, in all likelihood.

Thank you for your kindness!

@ swtwentyman » Thu Jun 02, 2016 1:29 pm

Ouch, didn’t realize Athenaze was so pricey. Booo.

I’ve already hit a few crashes/despairing moments. That’s part of why I’m doing both languages. If I get frustrated with one, break time and listen to music or something for another. Or calligraphy. Making it consistent is something I’m aiming on maintaining. It helps that I’ve stopped essentially all my time wasters.

Haven’t drank seriously since… October or November of last year? I just tend to dive headfirst into things. I -am- trying to optimize time, though. So, naturally, I spent the last two days reading on how to save time. :s

Yeah. I’m still trying to figure out that sweet spot of “just enough learning.” Too much honey makes you throw up, ya know?

I have a few nifty flashcard apps on the tablet. Thinking about making up flashcards, but not until I’m sure -what- to memorize.

Not so much -getting- sober. Though it’s definitely more useful than drugs. Cheaper, too!

Ahhh, so I should change the pronunciations, then? Wahhh.


@ Manuel

Oh! Guess I should purchase it instead of printing it, then! Thank you. I guess I can put it off for a bit.

HQ will go onto my list of books to investigate. Having a video series to follow would be a massive help. Thank you!

C. S. Bartholomew

I’ve heard of people falling into relying on the apps, so I’m a bit hesitant. And this tablet is not so great. Then again, my mysword has those options, and works offline, so… Hmm…

Ooh, so you’re someone I’ll likely be bugging quite a bit, then. :smiley:
I’m still trying to figure out which translation of Scripture in English to stick with. Have a NKJV that’s pretty handy.
.
Going to take a look at the interview in a little bit. Afraid tablet will crash and delete my reply, so cutting it short here. Thank you guys so much for the kind responses!

Please pardon my lazy English. It’s because I’m replying with Swype.

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I don’t mean to say that your pronunciation of Ancient Greek is somehow “wrong”, just that you shouldn’t get that hung up about it. Some systems are more historically-informed than others but if you find fricatives easier to pronounce and remember than aspirates (I do) don’t lose sleep over it.

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I don’t suppose there are any recordings on yt you’d suggest? The tablet I’m using can’t do JavaScript embedded videos.

I figure since it’ll likely be a bit before I can get ahold of a good textbook, I might as well get a really good handle on pronunciation.

… Well, as good of a handle as one can get on a dead language that no one speaks anymore.

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I’m getting a bit out of my comfort zone here (as I’m still basically a novice) but here is a page comparing several systems of ancient Greek pronunciation, alongside other information:

http://www.triviumpursuit.com/articles/comparison_of_greek_pronunciation_systems.php

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Athenaze book 1 costs $23 on amazon second hand including postage. You dont need to buy both volumes at once and I dont think the work books are necessary as there are lots of supplementary resources on the net. As to the inconvenience of grammatical material being spread over two volumes you should be making your own notes which you can refer to. In any event I would worry about getting through the first book rather than worrying what might happen later down the line.

I think its expecting to be able to do too much to read even the simplest unadapted text before you have got through something like Athenaze 1.

I agree that reading out loud is a good idea and its fun to learn how to imitate various kinds of pronunciation. I dont agree that listening to hours of recordings is a substitute for learning and relearning grammar and vocabulary. There have been many posts over the years about the best way to learn Greek and naturally people have their own preferences. I would say that whatever you try make sure its enjoyable. Learning Greek without a teacher is hard but not impossible.

Worry less about how you start and how you pronounce things, just begin and keep at it slowly and regularly.

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Then again, my mysword has those options, and works offline,

You have mysword, your all set up then. I just checked and the STEP bible doesn’t work offline on Tablets.

RE: books

Makes a lot of difference having the right textbook. Never have launched into NT Greek if all I had was the standard textbooks Machen (old days) and now days Mounce. Goetchius spoke directly to me since he was a proto-generative grammar linguist. Same deal with Homer, I couldn’t get anywhere with Pharr. But Benner was just right.

With Attic, I have no favorite textbook and it wouldn’t matter since my favorite wouldn’t do you any good. I have looked at all of them. Nothing stands out. I waver back and forth between recommending dialogue and narrative as the best place to begin reading. Simple dialogue often has condensed (abbreviated) syntax which can introduce confusion (e.g, The Birds, Aristophanes). Narrative isn’t always that simple. Ancient authors practiced story telling as an art form and in doing so the language could become quite complex. I looked over a recent text book which uses Plato’s dialogues for an introduction to the language. I thought it was a mixed bag. Not sure how it would fare as a first year text book. The library had it so I used it. If you can get your hands on it without buying it, take a look at it:

Learning Greek with Plato:A Beginner’s Course in Classical Greek Frank Beetham.

RE: realistic expectations

Couple weeks ago I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at Sahidic Coptic. Figured I would blast through Bently Layton’s 20 Lessons in a few weeks. Turns out Sahidic Coptic makes Hebrew look easy. Everything is inflected including prepositions. This is probably a similar experience to what a lot of people encounter with Ancient Greek. There are no short cuts. You gotta internalize a grammar system that is nothing like anything you have previously encountered.

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Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Maybe I should just pick a single textbook and memorize grammar/vocab along the way.

I’ll likely avoid philosophy.

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https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzvug8fVliPkMV2c9RmUix19nR4SvLOvW

This

Oh man, this may be just what I need.

I may just start compiling a YT thread, if it’s not already in existence/anyone is interested? I’ve already got a handful of enjoyable/useful videos. Plus, people who know more than me can check in on the videos and give their two cents worth.

Also, after studying Greek for most of the day, it’s weird coming back to a language without pitch markers. I may very well take up a singsong accent. It makes reading practice more fun.

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ἀπόλλυται

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The third recording? The third one I see listed is the alphabet. :frowning:

I’ll look at the other link in just a little bit. Thank you so much for your help!

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ἀπόλλυται

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I definitely like the singsong quality of his recording. It makes the eta sound less harsh, too.