I am coming to the end of my first year in learning Greek and still feel full of enthusiasm for the project. What a lifesaver it has been in this annus horribilis!
I have worked my way through two grammar books (White and Mastronarde) and am nearly to the end of book IV in the Anabasis,, with Mather and Hewitt as my trusty guides.
For the next stage, I want to read Lucian’s Verae Historiae (spirit of Momus in me) and then move on to Malcolm Cambell’s series of four readers. At the same time I will keep working on my weaknesses in grammar; I’m interested primarily in linguistics (including historical), literature, and rhetoric.
Does my program make sense? Would there be suggestions for ways to make it better?
I can highly recommend Dickey: Composition and Analysis of Greek Prose.
Before Dickey I did a grammar & translation book (H&Q) and I’ve been reading a few of Steadmans readers as well. I’ve also been decoding (slowly) a few other texts. This is wortwhile, but it’s a heavy emphasis of reading… but language is more than reading.
This is gonna sound a bit silly (it is) but I stand by it: I’ve only spent a few weeks with Dickey, but it’s as if doing this has unlocked extra brain power and learning capability for me. Before I focused only on reading, so I’ve been engaging with that part of the brain that’s good with reading, and neglecting the parts of the brain that deals with the skills of writing/speaking/listening.
Going from only reading to doing both reading and writing is engaging with the language +100% Before focusing on writing, I used to struggle with many silly little things, like forgetting verb conjugations or even if a word begings with a rough breathing or not. That more or less disappeared - not overnight, but very quickly - when I forced myself to write sentences with the words with pen and paper.
Take this with a grain of salt, but this far Dickey is the best thing I’ve done for my language learning by far.
Thanks for the reply, bjrn. I worked through the English to Greek translation sentences in my first Greek book and found that they made me really engage with the details of grammar, which interests me independently of my interest in learning to read Greek accurately and smoothly.
On the other hand, writing in Greek meant spending a lot of time worrying about questions like what preposition to use when I want to say “Lead the horse to the river.” That’s obvious to me now, but only after repeatedly seeing the usage in Xenophon.
I own Dickey and have looked into it, and I believe there’s an effort to limit the scope of what’s asked, so I will limit the scope of my fantasies about writing idiomatic Greek and try my hand at those exercises.
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
–Francis Bacon
I’m curious, did you feel that working through White and Mastronarde left you well prepared for reading the Anabasis?
I just started White, and had a similar plan of working through it, then another yet-to-be-determined textbook, and then moving onto Steadman’s editions of the Anabasis.
After completing Mastronarde, I found moving to the four Greek Prose Reading Course texts directly to be relatively straightforward.
I must admit I didn’t find the course notes to the texts to be of much use, since they’re geared almost entirely towards grammar, all of which is covered in Mastronarde. I ended up reading the texts but supplementing with commentaries. Todd’s Oxford commentary on Lysias 1 was excellent, I thought, as is Herrman’s green and yellow (published last year) on select speeches by Demosthenes.
Piekarski,
White was written to lead up to the Anabasis, and a simplified version of some episodes is used from early on, as reading exercises. The vocabulary is what you are going to find in the Anabasis, so it’s worth memorizing as much as possible. The approach to grammar is old-fashioned and it might be best to have some Latin (or Polish?) under your belt if you decide to use the book. In addition to White’s First Greek Book, which I used, there is also his Beginner’s Greek Book, more extensive lessons followed by the whole first book of the Anabasis. I like the way both books present the verb system–twice, once by tenses and moods, then by tense stems.
Truks,
I will definitely get hold of the commentaries you recommend. As for grammar, I’m the kind of learner who needs to go over it several times before I really feel confident. In reading Xenophon, I have been looking at every sentence and verb form. I want to know not just what is says, but how it says that. I am still finding some surprises.
Although Steadman’s free commentary does not have the depth of Todd it would be a useful adjunct as he lists the vocabulary for each section and briefly comments on some grammatical points. You can find it here https://geoffreysteadman.com/lysias-i/.
Unless you are very confident with the use of the optative you might want to leave the beginning of the speech until you have read the rest. That is the strategy we used when I read the text in class. The main body of the speech is quite straightforward.
Carey is quite old and not so helpful from what I remember. There is also M J Edwards, Lysias Five speeches, Bristol Classical Press, 1999. which might be worth it of you can find it cheap.
I like the old fashioned approach. Some of the more modern textbooks I’ve tried before, in my opinion, give to much information and not enough exercises for a beginner. White’s other book looks really useful too. Thank you for letting me know if it.
I obviously haven’t used it, but it’s on my radar for the future. It guides an intermediate student through three large sections of real Greek (including one from Xenophon’s Hellenica), has grammar exercises, and has an answer key, so it might the thing to help improve your grammar before or alongside reading the other texts on your list.
Before focusing on writing, I used to struggle with many silly little things, like forgetting verb conjugations or even if a word begings with a rough breathing or not. That more or less disappeared - not overnight, but very quickly - when I forced myself to write sentences with the words with pen and paper.