Grammar notes by Chad aside, if the point is immersion of the language of Attic Greek,
this is far too repetitive to be anything close to genuine Greek. You won’t find ἐστί this many times,
and in the last sentence, the second clause would most likely end in accented οὔ with no repetition of
the copula. I understand this method, just saying from experience it doesn’t work. (My study book
in university contained a lot of such passages and none of them prepared me at all for tackling Plato’s
Apology in the second semester.)
Grammar flaws aside…
Have you ever seen Ørberg’s Lingua Latina? The early stuff is monstrously repetitive, and classical Latin is not that repetitive either. Again, I make no pretense that I know Greek well enough to write such a text—only that such a thing could be done.
The idea behind the repetition is to drill in how εστι(ν) works. So that you never forget how. Ever. After, say, fifty sentences of this sort of thing, μεν… δε… is also clear (if you see μεν, δε is one to be ready for). If you see ο/η/το, εστι(ν) is the verb. If you see οι/αι/τα/ο και ο/κτλ, εισι(ν) is your verb. Pay attention to the reading—and there should be lots of it—and you’ll not make (many) mistakes in reading. My poorly written sample is probably not even 1% of what a first chapter would include.
I’ve seen immersion textbooks too: quality varies. But one thing is certain: the beginning of any text doesn’t resemble the complete language. Ever. It is simplified in grammar and vocabulary. This isn’t to say that the grammar and vocabulary aren’t used correctly—they’re just simple. They also rely on huge amounts of in-class instruction using the target language. Advanced Spanish classes discuss Neruda in Spanish. Advanced Latin classes discuss Vergil in English. I bet the Latin class experience is true for Homer.
My copy of Crosby and Schaeffer, which I understand to be held in high regard, has zero connected reading of any sort until lesson 12. Zero. To be sure, there are isolated sentences without context as exercises, but zero connected reading until lesson 12. And the first thing in that lesson is talk about translation. Who cares about translation? If I want to read Plato in translation, Penguin already has that. If I want to read Plato in Greek, I’ve gotta learn Greek (admittedly, I may have to do some translation of spots here and there in my head to make sure I understood what I read, but that’s another matter).
I’ll bet all the tea in China that your university text had a large portion of its text in English. I’ll bet that amount again that the grammar, save for a few examples, was wholly in English. Classical language textbooks, save for a isolated examples, are at least a century behind modern language teaching techniques. I love my Latin and Greek teachers, but they were teaching memorization of paradigms/grammar rules as the key. I hold them in high esteem, but their instruction didn’t teach me to read Greek and Latin as such. I did learn to decode them. Vast amounts of basic, comprehensible beginner Latin taught me how to read.
(I assume based on your dim view of immersion techniques that) You managed to learn how to read Plato by memorizing vocabulary lists and paradigms. Good for you. Seriously. Just realize that you are in a very small minority. I have no clue how I’m going to get to Plato without some serious pre-reading of Greek. I suspect the majority of language learners are like me (if my reading in second language acquisition theory and personal, albeit anecdotal, experience are the norm).
Though my experience is primarily in Latin, the same seems to be true—if not moreso—in Greek.
Ego enim potestatem nostrarum linguarum et Graecae et Latinae vivia voce, qua antiqui uti soliti sunt ipsi, credo (interdumque etiam ita doceo). Negare vocem his linguis est earum oblivisci: quam pauci latinitatem in schola iam discunt. Multi autem discipuli hodierni linguam hispanicam discunt, loqui tamen nequent. Status linguae discendae in America est malus. Status latinitatis etiam peior. Gracae pessimus.
- A neuter plural subject takes a singular verb. weird rule but it took me a while to get used
to it. - How many connected sentences with the copula included do you have in mind to appear in the first
chapter? Every sentence? Just a few on the first page? Doesn’t the concept of how it works become
clear after a while?
Actually, I’ve learned in a Hebrew university so the explanations were in Hebrew but I
understand what you mean. I don’t think it’d be possible to learn this language without detailed explanations in English or your native tongue. Exclusively immersing yourself in the language,
hoping you’d pick up the grammar rules as you go along without relying on Grammar notes,
is a method whose motives I understand but am not sure is possible in practice, at least
with these languages branded “Classical”.
I didn’t memorized paradigms just to read Plato, but it did help recognizing some of the words.
What I was more concerned about was to understand the Grammar and idiomatic usage and for that
purpose I had, and still have, Smyth and LSJ with me at all times. In my opinion – and again it’s only
mine – I cannot see myself succeeding in learning a language just by immersion.
@NateD26 You really need to take a look at the Ørberg materials (all of them in the Lingua Latina series) in order to understand clearly why Sinister Petrus, others, and I have praised them so highly and why we wish there to be a similar AG course. I am now on Chapter 20 of Lingua Latina, and my admiration for Ørberg’s vision and ability continues to increase.
With AG, I continue to go back and forth among various beginning grammars, trying to find the one (or several) that suit(s) me best as an autodidact. I thought that Anne Mahoney’s edition of W.H.D. Rouse’s First Greek Course, supplemented by her edition of Rouse’s Greek Boy reader would do the trick, but I find that the grammar and its exercises are very difficult to follow without a teacher’s help (well, it was designed to be used with a teacher) and the reader likewise.
I have gone back to Crosby and Schaeffer mainly because its limited vocabulary (600 words) and short lessons will allow me to learn the basics of Greek grammar rapidly. I am also investigating Crosby’s Greek Lessons, which focuses solely on the grammar and vocabulary of Xenophon’s Anabasis, in conjunction with his mid-19th-century Greek Grammar, to which Greek Lessons refers. Have bought Thomas Clark’s interlinear Greek-English edition of the Anabasis, as well as a lexicon of the Anabasis and an edition of the first four books with copious notes and maps. I like the idea of starting out with a limited lexicon and grammar, focused on one book by one author (Xenophon’s Anabasis).
- grumble I knew that (and forgot as I was writing).
- Ørberg goes on for about 750 or so words with no verb other than est/sunt in his first chapter. The purported lesson in the chapter is number: singular and plural. In reality,he’s actually doing about five things here. a: fixing the case of subject/verb agreement in number, b: introducing the notion of gender, and thus antecedent/noun agreement, c: declension, d: Latin’s notion of what word order is, and finally e: setting his story in context by introducing the geography of the Roman empire. It’s a remarkable text: I’ve never seen anything like it for any other language. There is a Spanish text that obviously imitates his approach, but it doesn’t seem as thorough or well-layered.
Back on topic, I’ve been thinking about learning Latin and Greek at the same time. The more I think about it, the less I think it is a possible (or necessarily desirable) thing. Are Latin and Greek even that much alike? Obviously, Latin took quite a few low-frequency, high-octane words from Greek, but the grammatical machinery seems very different. Where Latin seems to favor the infinitive, Greek favors the participle. Latin has no augment, Greek emphasizes aspect (relative to Latin). I might go so far as to say that they’re about as similar to each other as Old English is to Latin or Greek, and what similarity exists is a result of historical accident rather than a close linguistic relation. To cast it another way: Latin and Greek are about as similar as English and French.
I learned the basic grammar of Latin, which I am now reviewing after a hiatus of some 40 years, before I began studying Greek, which I am also now reviewing, and I think that this approach (Latin before Greek) is better than studying both at the same time. I have found Latin grammar to be simpler than that of Greek. True, it has the ablative, which Greek does not, but its verb system is much less complex. In addition, if English or a Romance language is the learner’s native language, he or she will be able to learn Latin vocabulary much faster than Greek because of all the cognates and loan words.
This is a English-Greek-Latin workbook, don’t know if it would be useful. I bookmarked it a few years ago with the same idea in mind, learning Greek and medieval Latin together.
Hi, there.
Well… the only latin-greek text I know that could be useful for learning would be a Comenius’ latin-greek translation of the Janua Linguarum. I don’t know if it follows the steps of the Orbis Sensualium units, or not, but I think after reading several times the Orbis, it would be a quite straightforward reading. The only problem would be the greek abbreviations used.
I found other books, but they aren’t intended for learning strictly speaking, but for reading. In any case, they are a Xenophon’s Symposion latin-greek edition, and a New Testament interlinear version writen by the spanish Humanist Benito Arias Montano. All books can be found in Google Books, but I don’t know if I am already allowed to post links to Google Books, so here you are the editions information:
- Title: Hē kainē diathēkē
Auctor: Johannes Leusden, Benito Arias Montano
Editor: Published by B.& S. Collins, 1838
Title: Janua Aurea Linguarum,: Et auctior & emaculatior quam unquam antehac, cum adjuncta graeca versione
Auctor: Joannes Amos Comenius, Theodor Simon
Editor: Ludovicus Elzevirius, 1642
Title Xenophontis, philosophi et imperatoris clarissimi, quae exstant opera, in duos tomos divisa: Graece multo quam ante castigatius edita…
Auctor Xenophon, Johannes Leunclavius, Aemilius Portus
Editor Ant. Stephanus, 1625
Hope that you have no problems finding them. Valete