I’ve hit a bit of a wall with Greek at the moment, and not sure how to get around it. Sometimes I can read passages quite fluently, other times I can understand the words, but have absolutely no comprehension of what is going on. At the moment I am trying to read through Plato’s Phaedo, and had no problem with the first few pages, but once Socrates starts philosophizing I start to get lost.
I am determined to work through it without consulting a translation, because I feel I have go to the point where that is more a hindrance than a help. However, I also feel I need to do more ‘learning’, but not sure what text book to go with next. Dickey’s Greek comprehension seems the logical next step, and I’ve made two attempts at it (and gotten reasonable deep into it)It’s been a massive help, but has it’s drawbacks, and life issues keep me from putting in a consistent practice. Something which focused on breaking down and analyzing Greek sentences as she does would be great, so if anyone has any recommendations in that directions, it would be very useful.
Any other tips to get over the slump would be much appreciated.
Don’t let Phaedo discourage you. It’s a very dense, difficult text, and it just gets more difficult as it moves along. I hope you’re using a good commentary, and I’d suggest abandoning your scruples against using a translation, at least to make sure you understand the Greek correctly once you’ve worked through a difficult passage.
I used this commentary in reading Phaedo, and I recommend it:
To be honest, in struggling through Phaedo, I often felt that Socrates’ arguments were incoherent and sometimes infuriating, but I’m philosophically naive, and I recognize that many readers have found it compelling, at least as a departure for their own thinking. As a literary composition, it’s brilliant.
I’m reading Homer, and, like you, I find that passages in the text differ dramatically in difficulty. Narrative is easy. It gets super hard when people are making fancy speeches.
In many activities, e.g., running or learning a musical instrument, it’s very common that progress is uneven. There will be times when you reach a plateau for a while, and other times when you make rapid progress.
It sounds like you’ve identified two things you’re doing that aren’t working for you: not practicing regularly enough, and not checking yourself with a translation. Since that’s not working, you should probably be changing those things.
Hi, it sounds like your difficulty is with the philosophy rather than the language. I’d suggest you go easy on yourself: this is hard stuff. To be honest, even classics commentaries on Plato sometimes get this wrong in my experience (one can’t expect classicists to always master philosophy, which is a discrete field of study, unless they have properly studied both fields: you can’t get one field ‘for free’ just by studying the other).
No need to worry if one can’t get this on the first read, just keep working at it. If you read Euclid or another technical writer, you’d expect parts to get tricky (due to the subject matter rather than the language): set your expectations in a similar way when reading Plato. In addition, some think that the latter parts of Phaedo were written later after Plato had travelled to Syracuse and talked with scientists there, and so Phaedo has all sorts of complications for the reader, but it’s more than worth it!
If you want to zoom out and put Phaedo in its context, I’d recommend reading as much of Guthrie’s history of Greek philosophy as you can (beautifully written, I love this work). Phaedo is set in, and responds in part to, a long history of philosophical thinking (e.g. on the soul as a harmony): the more of this you appreciate, the better your understanding of the work will be.
I was at a point a few years ago where I was not making a lot of progress and there was no end in sight. Eventually, I found that the sorts of things that I needed to improve for Greek fluency, skills like expecting what comes next in the sentence and understanding words and usages from their contexts, were skills that did were retarded by dictionaries, commentaries, and translations. When I got to the point where I could stop using them, I really started to see progress. That was about the time I started Phaedo. Maybe 2018 or 2019? The way I knew I was ready to try it, anyway, was when most sentences started to pop into sense after a dozen or so readings without dictionary or other aid. That improved over time, and it takes fewer readings now.
The hardest thing about it is that it takes very intense concentration. Most people haven’t ever read a dense mathematical proof, I suspect, but I remember banging my head against Hardy-Littlewood, and it required long periods of that sort of concentration. It got easier, but that was how it was at first.
Plato has very few nonsense arguments, certainly not in Phaedo. Nor is it highly technical, in the sort of way continental philosophy would be called technical today, or how neo-Platonism was with all of its abstracted meanings for terms (or even Aristotle). He’s not always right…but anything that looks like nonsense is probably a defect of understanding.
Thanks for the advice everyone, I will certainly look up the commentaries suggested. I think part of my problem is that a lot of the grammar that I learnt is no longer concious knowledge, but is still working away somewhere when I am reading Greek. This means when I do run into difficulties, I don’t know how to draw it out. I can tell what a verb is doing in a sentence more or less fine, but as me to conjugate the 3rd person plural aorist passive and it’s a bit of a struggle.
As I mentioned, I have found that refering to translations has been holding me back more than anything. I worked my way through the symposium using one, and I think that was a mistake. A good commentary, on the other hand, makes a huge difference!
I have found similar with narrative myself - Xenophon’s Anabasis is mostly easy reading, except when someone starts pontificating!
Yes, I forget this sometimes as I find Plato’s Greek lively and readable for the most part, and should remember that there is a deep philosophy underlying it. That said, the Symposium was more ore less manageable, and ‘Phaedo’ is hardly ‘Parmenides’!
I am having similar experiences at the moment, and find rereading the Greek and not refering to a dictionary, commentary or translation is a better approach. The moment I put the text down to look something up, my ‘Greek’ concentration is shattered, and it’s very hard to get back into it, so the longer I can go just reading the thing the better. Only at the end of a large passage will I make a note of words to look up or try a textual analysis. It’s surprising how much one can pick up when one removes the crutches!
I found helpful Steadman’s commentaries for the Apology, the Euthyphro, and the Crito. Most of the difficulties I had were removed by one of his specific notes.
There’s language comprehension and language production. They’re not necessarily super closely linked. For instance, a lot of Spanish speakers can understand spoken Portuguese fairly well, but they can’t produce it at all.
One thing that I find really difficult about ancient Greek, compared to modern Greek, is that it’s very hard to find a small enough collection of paradigms that I can master them. For modern Greek, I learned αγαπώ, αγαπάς, αγαπά, αγαπούμε, αγαπάτε, αγαπάν around 1990, and it’s still nice and solid in my brain. As Greek went through the koine period and evolved into dimotiki, it regularized the grammar a lot, so that if you know just a few paradigms like this one, you can get a huge amount of mileage out of them. But the ancient language has far more different patterns, so production can be a real struggle for me.
For recognizing inflections, I made charts of endings for nouns and verbs, and then I used software to create a deck of flashcards out of every word in book 1 of the Iliad: https://mnemosyne-proj.org/cards/vocabulary-and-inflections-iliad-book-1 (This is for the open-source, multiplatform flashcard application Mnemosyne.) The flashcards have an inflected form on the front such as ἔχωμεν, and on the back you’d have, in this example, ἔχω, to have, present 1 pl. subjunctive. For each card, I would try to recognize the inflection without peeking at the chart, but then if I couldn’t figure it out, I would look at the chart and make a second attempt before flipping the card and checking my answer. I would say this has been fairly effective for me when it comes to comprehension of verbs, but my ability to produce verb forms is still very weak.
I have a lot of difficulty with all the names in the Iliad, since they’re mostly third declension. Participles are also difficult, because there are so many different forms.
I would like to work on my language production more, but I’m finding that a big barrier is that the composition books I’ve been able to find (Lewis and Styler, Dickey) are written for some dialect that they don’t deign to identify, but which seems to be Attic. (I imagine a lot of the market for these books is Christian seminary students, so maybe the publisher doesn’t want to admit too openly on the cover that it’s not koine…?) The Homeric dialect is so different that when I try to do the exercises, I actually spend far more time trying to research how to transmogrify the didactic material into Homeric than I spend actually writing out the answers to the exercises. And then I have no way of checking whether my Homerified answers are correct.
I have found similar issues myself. I think Dickey’s book is great, and it has helped me make a big improvement, but without a teacher to actually tell me that something is correct or not (and why), it’s use can be limited. I also find it somewhat cumbersome to use, but this is my own fault as Dickey presumes you know quite a lot by heart already. She is right to do so, the book is designed to make us actually be good at Greek, but as I said above, I just haven’t had the time to focus on it in anyway that can keep up the momentum.
I will have to give the flashcard thing a go, I’ve seen them mentioned many times but never tried them.
As for writing Homeric, I guess part of the problem is that ‘Homeric’ dialect is a mish mash of a lot of other dialects.
the composition books I’ve been able to find (Lewis and Styler, Dickey) are written for some dialect that they don’t deign to identify, but which seems to be Attic. (I imagine a lot of the market for these books is Christian seminary students, so maybe the publisher doesn’t want to admit too openly on the cover that it’s not koine…?) The Homeric dialect is so different that when I try to do the exercises, I actually spend far more time trying to research how to transmogrify the didactic material into Homeric than I spend actually writing out the answers to the exercises.
With respect, let me try to address this, as I think it reflects some misunderstandings. I apologize if I’m writing things you know already.
Dickey’s text is 5th-4th cc. Attic, and it’s obviously – beyond needing to be stated – aimed at students who want to engage with the large body of writing in Attic Greek, not Christian seminary students (though they too might find it useful). Koine varieties of Greek – Koine is not really a single “dialect” – aren’t much different from Attic: they represent historical developments of Attic during later periods, beginning around the time of Alexander, basically preserving the morphology, syntax and vocabulary of Attic with a few modifications and simplifications and a bit of Ionic. The bulk of ancient Greek prose is Attic, and even in later periods, right down through the Byzantine era and beyond, many prose authors, including Christian authors, adhered to classical Attic or tried to. Differentiating between Attic and Koine as topics of study seems pointless (although those interested in New Testament Greek varieties have a substantial body of didactic material targeted specifically at reading the NT).
The only dialect other than Attic/Koine in which a substantial body of prose has been preserved is Ionic – specifically, in the Histories of Herodotus.
Homeric Greek was an artificial language. It evolved as a medium for oral epic poetry tailor-made for composition in performance. It was never a spoken language, and never a language in which prose was written. It developed and lived exclusively in hexameter and elegiac verse (and continued to be used as a medium for such poetry throughout antiquity). Homeric Greek combined and transformed features from several dialects – Ionic, Aeolic and even earlier elements – reflecting the historic or rather pre-historic processes through which epic poetry evolved. (Although Homeric Greek seems at first blush very strange, with its multitude of weird forms, and is unlike spoken forms of Greek, ancient Greek audiences were very familiar with it because they were steeped in it from infancy. But even they needed help understanding some elements.) In contrast, Attic was a spoken language and developed on a different path, with more complex (and in many respects different) syntax and a very extensive body of prose writing. Again with due respect, attempting to “transmogrify” Attic prose composition into Homeric Greek doesn’t seem like a productive exercise.
You might want to read something like Horrocks’ book on the Greek language.