I’m on page 1 of the AG Harry Potter. The main difficulty so far is the many new-to-me Greek words. However, the Perseus Word Study Tool provides definitions and parses, here:
The sentences on page 1 of HP are simple enough that after I know the meanings of the words I can usually make out what the sentences are saying.
I’ve also been reading the Latin Harry Potter, which, because I’m somewhat more advanced in Latin, is easier. I wanted to use the Latin version as a pony, but that isn’t working out for me.
I haven’t stopped daily work on Plato’s Symposium.
I haven’t read the Ancient Greek Harry Potter, but I did go to a talk about it a number of years ago… if I remember right, the speaker said that it’s written in a literary register, quite different from the style of the English.
I sometimes wonder if I’m the only person who’s read the whole thing cover to cover. Some of the reviewers certainly didn’t. Of at least they didn’t notice the (minor) easter eggs. Many people read the Greek and English side-by-side, I suppose, modern crib-practice.
The style is much more “Greek” than English, enough that you get a bit startled by conventions of the English novel that inevitably break in. The initial chapters have all the magic, and everything becomes a slog once they hit school – this may primarily be the fault of Rowling’s English original, I don’t know.
If you are resorting to Perseus for parsing very frequently, I would consider writing down your attempted parse every time before going to Perseus, and after write down why you got it wrong/right, and how you should have known. You may be able to kick the habit.
Good idea, Joel. I do a lot of writing while studying. But I had not thought of writing my guess before checking, even though I knew well that guess-first-then-check reinforces the links in memory, because of which it is a recommended study method.
“resorting to Perseus . . . frequently” describes me ;-(
slight tangent am I the only one who has started using chatgpt for a parsing cheat? It actually does a pretty good job (not perfect… sometimes it doesn’t know and I have to look elsewhere).
eta: oops, I wrote this before seeing the entire thread below about using chatgpt.
Now that I have almost finished page 1 of the AG Harry Potter, I’m getting better at using the Latin version as a pony. As I now see, the Latin and the Greek are pretty close to each other, sometimes word-for-word. If you can read the beginning pages of Roma Aeterna easily, then you will probably find the Latin Harry Potter useful as a pony.
I would say that in Greek, I’m an early-intermediate reader; reading the AG book requires dictionary work on every line and frequent re-study of grammatical topics and forms. On the Latin, though, I give myself a strong-intermediate rating, thanks to steady application AND the frequent help of textkit gurus.
I haven’t checked on its capabilities of parsing Greek and Latin, but it 3.5 did an absolutely terrible job at parsing or even producing paradigms of Akkadian. I haven’t bothered using it for facts since.
The possibilities of hallucinations (it’s not a fact-spitting machine) still make me leery of using it for translation purposes.
Why not read Herodotus in preference to the translation of Harry Potter? Herodotus’ Greek is easier and a joy to read (the dialect doesn’t take much getting used to), and the story-telling is far superior. The Potter translation is allusive, in the sense that you have to be well versed in ancient Greek literature in order to properly appreciate it—it’s a treat for scholars at play who can compare it with the English and admire it as a translation (that’s what it’s meant for), but it’s hardly an ideal learning text, while Herodotus is more self-standing, not dependent on familiarity with other texts.
And Herodotus even has Magi.
That’s a helpful comment, for I have been dodging H. because of concerns about the difficulty. On Harry Potter: FWIW my major effort is still on getting through Plato’s Symposium.
This should be no concern. Everything Michael has said is true, and furthermore, I find Herodotus much, much easier than most of the Greek starting points. I’d even say that Herodotus is perhaps ideal for new beginners to Greek: a fun story and readable Greek all in one. His language isn’t facile, but those who have went through their grammar books will find him fairly straightforward for much of his prose.
And the Ionic dialect will be a nice stepping stone to Homer anyway, as well as a few other poets such as Anacreon.
With Herodotus there’s bound to be an initial adjustment period while you get used to the style (and it is much more Greek than English), but I think you’d find it pays dividends. It’s entirely up to you of course. I don’t want to put anyone off the Potter translation, which is admirable as a translation (better read alongside the English than on its own). But Herodotus takes us straight into the thick of the ancient Greek world, and is pretty well inexhaustible.
With the possible exception of Homer, Herodotus is certainly the most rewarding Greek thing I’ve read. mwh called ihim inexhaustible, and that pretty much nails it.
Herodotus is great, of course, but why the importance of detailing a thread about something else? How much of the Greek Harry Potter have either Paul or Michael read? Will they give an exact answer? (Even accepting Michael’s method of doing so only with the English by his side, because that’s how it’s “meant” to be read.)
I’ll join in the praising of Herodotus, and can perhaps claim to have something relevant to say as I’m currently reading it in Greek for the first time. In contrast, I haven’t read a word of Ἅρειος Ποτήρ, so please no one take any of the following as a comment on the merits or otherwise of that book.
Hugh, if the only thing putting you off Herodotus is the difficulty, then please stop worrying. I think you made a great point in your Thucydides thread a while back when you said that no unadapted text is really ‘easy’ when you’re at an intermediate level (actually you said ‘borderline beginner-intermediate’, but I think you’ve read more than enough to be able to ditch the first part of that description) - but relatively speaking, there’s nothing daunting about the Histories when compared to other works.
I will say that it was slower going for me at first than the other stuff I’ve been reading recently (Isaeus, Isocrates and Xenophon), because of the dialectical differences, but I’m in my second week now and am noticeably speeding up. It helps, of course, that the text is just so interesting, and the episodic, digressive style means you can get through a story in a relatively short time. I find myself really looking forward to reading more when I get home from work.
Speaking of the work’s interest, I’ll just add that the most enjoyable and interesting course I ever did at University involved reading and discussing a book of Herodotus a week (in translation, plus Plutarch’s On the Malice of Herodotus for good measure). There is just so much there, and returning to it now is a curious experience - many things I’d forgotten about it are coming back to me, but there’s also all this seemingly new stuff that I evidently didn’t focus on before. I agree that ‘inexhaustible’ is an apt description.
Joel doesn’t like my having introduced Herodotus into a thread about Harry Potter, and wants to know exactly how much of the Greek Potter either Paul or I have read. I can’t speak for Paul, but as for myself, the answer is no more than thirty or forty pages (the quidditch match is what I remember best), and that was when it first came out, when I had read each of Rowling’s Potter books in succession year by year, thanks to my two young sons. A better question, but still not a particularly good one, might have been how much Herodotus I have read. Not that it should be a matter of quantity.
I make no apology for reading the Greek Potter alongside the English, or for saying that’s how it’s meant to be read. I think the most profitable as well as the most enjoyable way of approaching Wilson’s translation is to appreciate it precisely as a translation. It’s not as if it pretends to be anything else. It invites the σύγκρισις. Unfortunately Joel confuses this with using a “crib.” Of course if anyone prefers to read the translation by itself, without comparing the English original, they’re free to do so, but that risks missing much of the translator’s skill and ingenuity.
Hugh, I expect we all find that a second reading is rather different from the first—and hopefully better!
My own experience was that a read through of Harry Potter, without the English, was pretty useful for my ability to read Herodotus immediately after. I went from being able to slowly pick through his stories, to being able to read new bits of Herodotus by the campfire and translate him aloud for the nieces and nephews. I thought that this was neat. And useful. Wilson knocks a good foundation into you.
I no doubt missed much of Wilson’s skill and ingenuity – although I noticed a few things that bypassed the published reviews – but I was reading something like Harry Potter to improve my vocabulary and language skills, not for Wilson’s translation art, which grew somewhat wearying to me after a few dozen pages, as you perhaps found too. It’s not really living Greek.
I know that I keep returning to the importance of reading without translations by one’s side. And I know that I’m rehashing an argument older than Tom Brown’s Schooldays and made better there than I can make it myself. But if you are truly skeptical about the utility of that practice for general reading ability, let’s pick some Greek new to the two of us and have a go at it together in a video call.
[I read TBS for the same reason that you read HP; it was for my daughters the other year, and it was a hit. My wife has done the Harry Potter series, which is a bit much for me. I will probably read them Stalky at some point so that they can have the artistic peak of the schoolboy story, to go with its genesis and modern form, which they have had in TBS and HP. But they are poetry monsters at the moment.]
