Hello. I started learning Greek 2-3 months ago and it’s going pretty well… though I’m spending more way time than I thought and working on the language every day instead of a few days per week as I naively thought would work.
When I’m done with my beginner textbook (Hansen & Quinn: Greek, An Intensive Course) I’d like to find a book, if one exists, that covers the same material as a beginner textbook, but written for someone that already knows the material. More focus on the big picture and how parts are connected - instead of beginner textbooks that needs to stage things to not overwhelm the student, and spend a lot of time and tables on relatively uninteresting details.
These kinds of expository books are, by far, more favorite part of learning new subjects (not just languages), and some of my favorite textbooks all time are written in this style [1]. That is, presenting fundamentals of a topic for someone that already knows the fundamentals. They are like a tool for tempering/hardening knowledge, in a sense
[1] A famous example for you computer scientists and software engineers would be Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), a book that’s often voted the best beginner software eng. book for people who are not beginners.
Its not possible to learn a language unless you do it every day.
Once you feel you have a command of the syntax you could start a prose composition book such as North and Hillard or Sidgwick and read an unadapted text.
As to the bigger picture dont rush the early fences. Rushing things will mean you just have to keep going over the same ground.
Hi, a book that covers the same material as a textbook, but laid out coherently rather than staged into lessons, is a grammar. There are several grammars out there that are useful.
It’s a separate question, however, as to whether this would be the best thing to read next. (I don’t think it would!). There are numerous threads on this forum debating how to take the second step along the path of learning Greek.
Out of grammars, Morwood’s or Kaegi’s are both great, and meant for that purpose, more or less. You can tell us later if you do yourself a damage with them, or crash into a fence.
I am at about the stage bjrn describes. I slogged my way through White’s 1896 First Greek Book and now I am about three-quarters of the way through Mastronarde, as a review. At the same time I am marching through the first book of the Anabasis, for which White carefully prepared me.
I especially like Mastronarde’s online tutorials, the noun and verb drills. You can review by unit, by random sets, or by type of form. I do find his explanation of grammar rather diffuse at times, maybe because he is writing for an audience that presumably doesn’t know a participle from a particle. For putting it all together, it sometimes helps to read (and re-read) selected parts of the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek, for example the chapter on the formation of aorists
For the Anabasis, Mather and Hewitt are my guides. I plan to follow them to the end of book 4, and when I run out of Mastronarde look for other ways to school myself in the grammar. I am reluctant to do “composition” unless the solution, once found, turns out to be some light modification of a sentence written by an actual ancient Greek. I could show you examples of “English” written by non-native authors of grammar textbooks–grammatically impeccable, idiomatically impossible.
The book is “The Composition and Analysis of Greek Prose” by E. Dickey. I’ve only skimmed it this far but it seems great: I recognize a lot of the material from my textbook but its presented in a different way (for people who want to focus on composition rather than reading). It also has references to the appropriate sections of Smyth:s so it’s that midway I’ve been looking for: between a beginner textbook and a full grammar. I also love the first page: there’s a huge warning message in the book that says “IMPORTANT NOTE: ALMOST EVERY RULE IN THIS BOOK HAS EXCEPTIONS, MOST OF WHICH ARE NOT MENTIONED”. I think that’s honest, and the right level for a second book.
I think a nice complement to this book would be Kaegis grammer, which I’ve previously only used for reference but I think I will work through.
Dickey is much admired and some people here have worked through it. You will find several threads on this forum about it. The main problem is that not all the of the exercises have answers in the book. There is a key for North and Hillard, my earlier suggestion, which you can get for free on line. Some of the answers are debatable.
If you want to learn grammar, then go ahead, Dickey is an excellent resource for that. You can then read some of the grammars. In fact, you could skip direclty to Smyth after you’re done with Dickey.
If what you want to do is learn (i.e., acquire) Greek, the last thing you want to do is study more grammar. You need to focus on giving yourself comprehensible input, which means (to oversimply greatly) to read a lot of easy material. You could, for example, read the New Testament copiously, then move on to Xenophon.
The next step learning complex stuff is never obvious to me. But I’ve learned enough difficult material on my own in my life that I know that this first year is going to be a mess regardless of what I do, and in a couple of years time I will probably regret doing some things.
That said. What I think I want to do the next 12 months is this:
Finish my textbook (around 8 more weeks), which focus on basic grammar and translation Greek->English,.
Work through Dickey just to get a deeper understanding of the grammar I’ve already learned in step 1.
At the same time as step 2, read as much as possible.
Step 2 is, strictly speaking, probably not necessary, however as I mentioned in my first post: exposition style books is my favorite part of learning new material, so I want to do that for it’s own sake. And Dickey seems to be that kind of expository writing that I enjoy,
(For reasons I can’t fully articulate to even myself, I’ve also ordered the book Greek Particles by Denniston which I really, really look forward to reading. That’s probably not great 1st year material, but then again I’m in no rush to do this in optimal order…).
If you work through Dickey, that is fine. Just be aware that it is going to be very, very difficult. Much more difficult than Hansen and Quinn. If your interest in grammar is too great to set it aside, then it won’t hurt (other than slowing you down unnecessarily). But it won’t help to make your reading easier, not one bit. It will only help you learn grammar. And my advice is not to try and apply, while reading, the grammar that you have learned. Focus as much as you can on just reading along, trying to understand as much as you can in an intuitive way by taking in the Greek directly. Only use the grammar when you can immediately see an obvious grammatical point that will help you straight away to understand the text. Repeated readings are great, but do not analyze the grammar.
If you start analyzing the grammar of the texts you read, you will not be learning to read Greek, you will be learning grammar, which is a very different thing. If you go down that path, you could find yourself in 5 years still unable to read anything fluently. This is very important! Consult the works of Stephen Krashen to see why. People have memorized, verbatim, entire dictionaries and grammars, and still made no progress whatsover in their fluency, just to find out later on that all they had to do was get enough comprehensible input. And even if you want to learn grammar, the most efficient way to do so is to first acquire the language.
bjm, Your 3-step plan seems just right to me; 2 & 3 together—excellent. Translate into English as little as possible, so that you get used to Greek as Greek.
I write mainly to lament: first that you chose Hansen and Quinn to start with (but don’t drop it at this point), and second, more lamentable, that Dickey’s prose book is keyed to Smyth rather than to the Cambridge Grammar, which wasn’t out in time for Dickey. Can’t be helped now, but I recommend using the newer grammar in preference to Smyth as much as practicable. It’s much less user-unfriendly, and linguistically much more respectable.
Denniston you might enjoy dipping into. Particles are the most difficult thing in Greek, and Denniston knew them better than almost anyone.
(P.S. Kurama’s viewpoint above is shared by too many today, and I trust you’re not one of them. You’ll do much better if you correlate your reading of primary texts with the grammar—as it seems you’re intending to do.)
OK I give up. I have been wanting to put this in and now the conversation comes to point where I just can’t resist any more. It’s in German and the point is not exactly how I look at this question. But just for fun.
Wer so gut Griechisch kann, dass er anspruchsvollere Texte einfach Wort für Wort liest, benötigt diese Übungen nicht. Wer sich griechische Texte - gleich nach welcher Methode - erst erschließen muss, wird die Erfahrung machen, dass die Prädikatsformen und überhaupt alle Verbformen für die Satzstruktur so beherrschend sind, dass sie geradezu das Einlasstor für jedes Textverständnis darstellen. Beherrscht man sie, hat man zwar keine Garantie für das Gelingen der Textarbeit, aber eine notwendige Bedingung erfüllt.
Allen Verführern, die da behaupten, diese Arbeit sei stumpfsinnig - und es gibt sie in großer Zahl - und nicht das eigentliche Ziel des Griechischunterrichts, sei gesagt: Ein Geiger, der sich um Etüden drückt, wird bei den Berlinern keinen Brahms spielen. Ein Eisläufer, der die Pflicht nicht beherrscht, wird auch in der Kür nicht glänzen. Ein Gräzist, der seine Formen nicht beherrscht, wird sich weder Platons Höhlengleichnis noch ein Archilochos-Gedicht noch sonst etwas wirklich aneignen können. Wie will man Primärtugenden leisten, wenn man sich schon bei den Sekundärtugenden damit herausredet, sie seien nur sekundär?
In der Tat hat der Griechischunterricht andere Ziele. Aber man muss sich auch um den richtigen Weg zu diesen Zielen bemühen.
Looking at the Impressum, the website appears to be run by Egon and Gisela Gottwein as means of supplying their students with learning materials. They don’t cite any author for their tips on how to approach Greek, so I imagine they’re the authors.
Here’s the URL for their Homepage (their only email addresse appears to be for donations):
This is excellent advice from mwh, as always and shouldn’t be lost amongst the later posts. I also wholeheartedly agree with his remarks on Kurma’s post.
While that may or may not be a useful resource, it does not bear any resemblance to an “updated Denniston” (which Dover already updated once, though unfortunately doing all edits minimally to preserve the typeset and save costs).
I didn’t find much use from Denniston until I could read most of the untranslated Greek examples more or less smoothly. It’s a big book of sorted examples demonstrating each type of particle use, with copious quotations, and somewhat limited English explanation, not gloss-focused. It is wonderful when you get to the point where you can read it. It really deserves to be digitized in some form or another, or updated.
This is what I started doing at the beginning of this year - working through Dickey and trying to read the Symposium. I only got as far as chapter 7 of Dickey (time constraints stopped me doing both), but it has been the thing that has pushed my Greek forward the quickest and the most(est) - during Spring, I had to break down more or less every sentence of the Symposium, now I find I can read and comprehend relatively large chunks, and am making fewer and fewer errors (still a lot though!).
