I’ve had a copy of this for years and sometimes flip through it but I’ve never conscientiously used it.
Has anyone here gone through the book completely and done all the exercises? Was it worth it? Was it enough to embark on reading real Ancient Greek on your own account armed only with a dictionary and reference grammar?
Interesting that no one has replied. For some reason these ‘teach yourself’ books don’t seem to be popular when it comes to ancient languages, even among people who are teaching themselves.
I see the reissued version, “Teach Yourself Ancient Greek: A Foundation Course,” on Internet Archive. It does not use accents. I’m tempted to dislike it…but the language teacher seems to have a gift for giving clear and simple explanations. I like how it starts out with mixed English/Greek, throws in some transliteration at the beginning, eases the reader into the alphabet.
I also have a copy of “Teach Yourself New Testament Greek” by D. F. Hudson (which omits accents like Teach Yourself Greek) and “Teach Yourself Hebrew” by R. K. Harrison.
I actually collect the old little hardcover British “Teach Yourself” language books of the 1950’s to early '70’s. I have a large collection accumulated over the years. When I started collecting them (before the Internet) there were gaps all over in my collection that I thought would never be filled. Once the Internet came, I was eventually able to fill all the gaps in my collection with books I had no hope of finding in local second hand bookstores like Teach Yourself Samoan, Teach Yourself Yoruba, Teach Yourself Romanian, Teach Yourself Czech, etc.
These old Teach Yourself books vary greatly in quality. Some are excellent, like Teach Yourself Italian by Kathleen Speight or Teach Yourself Latin by F. Kinchin Smith. Teach Yourself Latvian is another good one. Others are a complete nightmare like Teach Yourself Finnish or Teach Yourself Russian. Looking at those two particular volumes I wonder if anyone ever actually succeeded in getting through them.
Some are excellent, like Teach Yourself Italian by Kathleen Speight or Teach Yourself Latin by F. Kinchin Smith.
I have to disagree about Teach Yourself Latin by F. Kinchin Smith. It was inferior to W.A. Edward’s “Self Educator in Latin” that Smith revised. https://archive.org/details/selfeducationin00edwagoog For instance, Smith removed roughly half of Edward’s exercises, yet the answer key to those deleted exercises remains.