TEACHING YOURSELF GREEK

Greek

And now to Greek. Let me repeat my caveat that the resources I am about to cite, while seemingly the most widely used, are by no means the only ones. Also, some of the resources I will cite have serious drawbacks for self-study.

"Ancient Greek" covers a millennium's worth of styles and dialects, from Homer to Hellenistic and biblical Koine and beyond. Most introductions, and the ones I discuss, are for classical Athenian Greek of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. I don't cover specialized introductions to Homer, Koine, non-Attic lyric poets, inscriptions, etc.

Greek on the computer; accentuation; pronunciation

As a student in the classroom or as an autodidact, you'll want to type in ancient Greek (i.e., polytonic Greek, meaning with appropriate diacritics). Go to the American Philological Association's GreekKeys site, purchase a license for GreekKeys 2008 (2008 is the current, Unicode-enabled, Mac- and Windows XP/7-compatible version). It takes a little practice to learn the right key combination to get the desired combination of diacritics, but it's really cool (the natural-language method doesn't require writing on parchment or papyrus!).

Along with the different alphabet, accents are in fact one of the initial hurdles in learning ancient Greek. The introductory texts give you all the rules you need and perhaps will ever need. But Intense will at some point want to read Philomen Probert's A New Short Guide to the Accentuation of Ancient Greek, which is a scholarly work but also has exercises (with answer keys).

As an autodidact, you'll need to make a decision about which pronunciation to follow. The three primary choices are modern Greek, Erasmian, or classical Athenian as restored by contemporary scholarship. If you choose restored, you then have to decide whether to attempt pitch accents (classical-era Greeks spoke with pitch accents, but that is very difficult for most English speakers) or to accept the compromise of restored pronunciation but stress accents. You can imagine this becomes a hairy scholarly and pedagogical subject. Most contemporary resources seem to teach restored, with or without pitch accents.

Whatever your choice of pronunciation, or to help you with your choice, get Stephen G. Daitz's audio CD, The Pronunciation and Reading of Ancient Greek, from Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, as well as a separate disc, The Living Voice of Greek and Latin Literature: PDFs For All Recordings. (My order from Bolchazy got mixed up, and by the time it was resolved, I'm not sure how I ended up with the PDF disc, but the audio CD works off material in the PDF, so be sure to get both. The PDF contains the text for all the readings in the Bolchazy-Carducci The Living Voice recordings, including the entire Iliad and Odyssey. You'll want Daitz even if you get other resource-specific audio CD's like those mentioned below.)

Crosby & Schaeffer

The distinction between the grammar-first and natural-language, or immersion, approaches applies to ancient Greek as well as Latin. An Introduction to Greek by Henry Lamar Crosby & John Nevin Schaeffer (popularly known as Crosby & Schaeffer) enshrines the grammar-first approach for Greek. This 1928 classic is available on Amazon in a 2009unabridged reprint from Dover. It is also available from Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, evidently with a "New Introduction" and "An Appreciation" added (I was unaware of the Bolchazy edition and bought the Dover reprint). The approach is virtually identical to Wheelock, or maybe I should say the Wheelock approach is virtually identical to Crosby & Schaeffer. Not counting review chapters, Crosby & Schaeffer packs foundational grammar into sixty incredibly concise chapters (each headed by an equally brief keep-you-motivated quote), along with limited vocabulary (primarily to prepare you to read Xenophon, as many older Latin school textbooks aimed at preparing schoolboys to read Caesar) and a limited number of Greek-to-English and English-to-Greek translation exercises. (The pronunciation guidelines in the Introduction would be considered Erasmian.)

There are no "officially" published keys to the exercises in Crosby & Schaeffer that I am aware of. This and its brevity of exposition seriously limit its value for the autodidact. It was the textbook used when I first learned Greek in college, so partly out of nostalgia and partly out of the multiple-warhead approach I have chosen to relearn Greek, I am using it along with what follows. For most self-learners, though, it's not going to suffice, especially if you're teaching yourself Greek from scratch.

Just as seriously, in my opinion, at least for Intense, Crosby & Schaeffer suffers the same drawbacks of the grammar-first approach discussed above for Latin. Fortunately, there are two outstanding contemporary realizations of the natural-language, or immersion, approach, though one is near fatally flawed for self-learning purposes.

Reading Greek/Cambridge and Athenaze/OUP

I refer to the Reading Greek series by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers (JACT), published by Cambridge University Press, and the Athenaze series by Maurice Balme and Gilbert Lawall, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). Like Familia Romana, these two Greek series teach grammar in conjunction with immediate immersion in stories about a fictional family. In fact, in both series the fictional lead character is Dikaiopolis, a character borrowed from Aristophanes's The Acharnians. The setting is the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. Woven into the story line about Dikaiopolis are threads from Greek mythology, Homer, and Greek and Attic history, threads that gradually include mildly adapted content from classical authors. Both series are handsomely packaged and rich with illustrations of ancient art and architecture and with excellent essays on Greek and Attic history and life.

(Readers beware! The stories in Reading Greek and Athenaze have a dark side to them absent in Familia Romana. Maybe it's the difference between the era of the Pax Romana in which Julius and his family live in the Familia Romana and the turbulent times in Attica at the outset of the Peloponnesian war.)

Both series are in their second editions and require the purchase of multiple volumes. At least on Amazon, there are some leftovers from the first editions, so be very careful for any volume in either series to order the second edition. (Reading Greek was first published in 1978, the second edition in 2007. Athenaze was first published in the early 1990's, the second edition in 2003.) 

Reading Greek

JACT requires the following three volumes:

1. Reading Greek: Text and Vocabulary
2. Reading Greek: Grammar and Exercises
3. Reading Greek: An Independent Study Guide

Strictly speaking, it requires the first two volumes. The Independent Study Guide is for the self-learner. JACT explicitly caters to self-learners as well as classrooms. The study guide gives translations of the exercises in Text and Vocabulary and keys to the exercises inGrammar and Exercises.

A criticism of Reading Greek, one I regard as trivial, is that you have to switch back and forth between the volumes when you study.

In addition, you'll want the Reading Greek 2-disc audio CD, which contains an introduction to the restored pronunciation and entertainingly dramatized readings from many of the chapters.

Finally, I would recommend the companion, The World of Athens: An Introduction to Classical Athenian Culture, thought it is not required for language learning and though it is excerpted throughout the textbooks.

Without qualification, I have found Reading Greek a perfect self-learning vehicle for learning or relearning ancient Greek.

Athenaze

Since Athenaze is almost identical in concept and production, I would like to make the same unqualified recommendation for it. Unfortunately, I can't. Unlike its Cambridge brethren, OUP does not cater to the self-learner. In fact, it seems this is intentional. But read on.

To pursue Athenaze on your own, you need the following volumes (Athenaze distributes its thirty chapters over two books, so you wouldn't have to get the second books immediately):

• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Book I
• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Book II
• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Workbook I
• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Workbook II
• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Teacher's Handbook I
• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Teacher's Handbook II
• An Audio CD to accompany Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek

Unfortunately, OUP only makes the teacher's handbooks and audio CD available to teachers and institutions purchasing the set for classroom teaching. They have confirmed this is their policy, for example, in correspondence to me from their Marketing department: "For obvious reasons we do restrict distribution of any text that provides the solutions or answers to the problems in the student books. I understand that this leaves the self-taught student in a difficult position." Actually, the reasons are not obvious to me, especially since it doesn't seem to trouble JACT, but that's OUP's policy.

For the record, I was ultimately able to persuade the publisher to sell me the teacher's handbooks and the audio CD, but it was an ordeal, and you should assume you wouldn't be as lucky. The teacher's handbooks indeed are not just the translations and exercise keys; they are full of suggested teaching techniques and so in fact addressed to teachers and not students. Unfortunately, as a self-learner, I am both the teacher and the student. And the handbooks are the only source with keys to the exercises in the main books. (It's shortsighted to try to learn a language without doing exercises and without checking your answers. I continually amaze myself at how stupid, or careless, I can be.)

The Introduction to Ancient Greek Books I and II contain the stories plus grammar and exercises. As I've said, only the teacher's handbooks have the story translations and exercise keys. The complementary Workbooks I and II provide additional exercises for each chapter, with an answer key included. And no audio guidance. So it's a mixed bag. (The Reading Greek 2-CD set sweeps the Academy Awards for best performance by male and female leading and supporting actors, best sound and dramatic effects, and best documentary explaining the restored pronunciation. But the Athenaze CD serves its purpose; I especially like that it sticks with the pitch accent throughout its readings and does so at a pace you can follow and practice.)

The Italian Athenaze

If you browse around, you'll undoubtedly find references to an Italian edition of Athenaze, by Luigi Miraglia and T. F. Bórri: Athenaze: Introduzione al greco antico. You can get more information from the publishing arm of the Accademia Vivarium Novum. Miraglia took the first edition of the English-language Athenaze and Ørberg-ized it (my vulgar term, his acknowledgment): He and his co-authors added stories (without disrupting the Dikaiopolis plot line) along with Lingua Latina-like marginal notes (all in Greek, of course) and illustrations, with the pedagogical goal of learning vocabulary and grammar more by contextual induction, less by native-language glosses. In a virtuous circle, the second edition of the English Athenaze in turn acknowledges "inspiration" from Miraglia.

The Vivarium Novum web site claims a teacher's guide is in the works (Guida per i docenti), but it seems it's been in the works for over ten years. In lieu of the guide itself, the site provides Miraglia's sketch for a guide. It makes for interesting reading. Despite a classical education many of us would be jealous of, Miraglia gives autobiographical witness to what Dowling warns of: After years of diligent memorization of grammar, after many guided readings, confronted with the simplest sentence, without the aid of translation or glosses, you still have to "sweat seven shirts" and frantically consult the dictionary just to elicit a plausible "deciphering" of the sentence's meaning.

Like the English editions, the Italian Athenaze distributes its chapters over two books,Athènaze A (I) and Athènaze B (II). Each has a companion volume of additional exercises, written by Carmelo Cònsoli, Meletèmata A (I) and Meletèmata B (II). For the sixteen chapters of Athènaze A, Alessandro Barbone has provided yet more supplemental exercises, Quaderno d'esercizi (cap. I-VIII) and Quaderno d'esercizi (cap. IX-XVI). And as supplemental reading to chapters twenty and beyond, Alessandro Barbone and T. F. Bórri have added an edition of The Tablet of Cebes (La Tavola di Cebète), an allegorical work passed down in the tradition as being the work of Cebes of Thebes, a pupil of Socrates.

The Italian Athenaze has no exercise keys. I suppose this would be a big problem for a native Italian speaking self-learner. For my purposes, especially since I am also brushing up on my Italian, I use the Italian edition as a fun and useful supplement, to aid my Italian as well as my Greek. As with Lingua Latina, I find the all-Greek marginal notes and illustrations a big help in learning the Greek vocabulary. 

If you live outside Italy, getting the Italian Athenaze is not necessarily easy. The Vivarium Novum web site is an eye feast and very informative (you can click on each book, enlarge the display, and leaf through its pages). But the shopping cart checkout is broken (as they acknowledged to me) and in any case only takes bank transfers, not credit cards. The only way you can hope to reach them is by phone. A well-meaning young man there tried his best to help me, but they just don't have the logistics to handle overseas orders. You can get the books through other Italian online sellers, once you struggle through trying to create a profile with a U.S. address. I got the books from libreriauniversitaria.it.

(By the way, if you're teaching yourself Italian, I highly recommend La Lingua Italiana per stranieri: Corso Elementare ed Intermedio, by Katerin Katerinov and M. C. Borioso Katerinov. [For the exercise key, La Lingua Italiana per stranieri: Chiave degli esercizi e dei test, and for the corso medio and corso superiore volumes in this series, you'll have to shop around on Italian web sites.] The book is an exemplar of the immersion method: Each chapter starts with a dialog, then grammar, without a single non-Italian word. Caveat: While still available, the publication is from 1985, so the content feels a little dated.)

So back to the English editions. Do I recommend Reading Greek or Athenaze? In my opinion, as an autodidact, you would do equally well with either, if, for Athenaze, you could get the teacher's handbooks and audio CD. If you have the patience and enjoy the readings as much as I do, you'll do even better working through both.

Speaking ancient Greek

Speaking is such an important part of acquiring a natural feeling for the language. So is there an Adler + Millner for Greek? Adler's A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language (1858) is said to follow the approach of a nineteenth-century German grammarian, Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff (see the Wikipedia articles on Adler and Ollendorff). This approach is grounded in the verbal repetition of a progressively or perpetually growing repertoire of phrases and idioms. There is an 1852 Greek Ollendorff; being a Progressive Exhibition of the Principles of the Greek Grammar: Designed for Beginners in Greek, and as a Book of Exercises for Academies and Colleges, by an Asahel C. Kendrick, available digitally and in reprint. And indeed the same Evan Millner at least started a podcast of Kendrick's Greek Ollendorff in early 2010, as did a David Clark. (Millner's podcast also uses an 1856 work A New Practical and Easy Method of Learning the Greek Language after the System of F. Ahn). However, it appears these efforts stalled quickly. There seems to still be missing a good tool equivalent to LATINUM for learning to speak Ancient Greek.

(Kendrick's Greek Ollendorff, unlike Adler, is not a grammar. Strictly speaking, according to Kendrick's preface, it is intended to "precede the use of any Grammar." I'm also not aware of a key to the Greek Ollendorff exercises. But Kendrick's Greek Ollendorff has exactly ninety-seven lessons, just like Adler. Is 97 a mystical Ollendorffian number?)

Greek Dictionaries and Reference Grammars

The classic English dictionary for ancient classical-era Greek is the Liddell-Scott-Jones A Greek-English Lexicon, Ninth Edition with a Revised Supplement. (This was originally published in 1843. You may know that Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for Henry Liddell's daughter Alice.) So far I have been using the less expensive Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, Abridged: Original Edition, republished in larger and clear typeface, a reprint of the 1909 "Little Liddell." 

The classic English-language reference grammar is Greek Grammar by Herbert Weir Smyth, originally published in 1920 and available in reprint, popularly known as Smyth.

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