How Can I Learn Ancient Greek While Learning Modern Greek?
September 10, 2020 9:10 AM Subscribe
I want to read Ancient Greek. Not sure exactly which - I don’t need to read Homer, but Plato would be nice. I’m using Rosetta Stone modern Greek to get started. I realize this isn’t necessarily considered a good idea, but I learn SO MUCH more easily from this kind of resource than from a book and I gather that there’s enough similarity that I’m pretty sure it’s a good idea for me.
My question is, what can I supplement with/keep in mind right away to improve my learning curve/eventual transition to Ancient Greek? Books are fine in this case, but the more specific the advice, the better.
My question is, what can I supplement with/keep in mind right away to improve my learning curve/eventual transition to Ancient Greek? Books are fine in this case, but the more specific the advice, the better.
Mango has an Ancient Greek course. Mango is very similar to Rosetta Stone.
posted by hydropsyche at 9:27 AM on September 10, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 9:27 AM on September 10, 2020 [2 favorites]
That's a great quarantine project!
To really get a grasp of the language, you need to think in it and converse in it, even if all you want is to eventually read Plato. Athenaze (Italian edition) is the gold standard. Harley & Quinn or JACT are distant seconds. Look around on r/greek. Watch ScorpioMartianus on Youtube. He has a Patreon also, with additional content and a Discord server.
If you like intensive immersion, look at Academia Vivarium Novum's distance learning course in Greek, using Athenaze. I can't say enough good things about it.
posted by dum spiro spero at 10:52 AM on September 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
To really get a grasp of the language, you need to think in it and converse in it, even if all you want is to eventually read Plato. Athenaze (Italian edition) is the gold standard. Harley & Quinn or JACT are distant seconds. Look around on r/greek. Watch ScorpioMartianus on Youtube. He has a Patreon also, with additional content and a Discord server.
If you like intensive immersion, look at Academia Vivarium Novum's distance learning course in Greek, using Athenaze. I can't say enough good things about it.
posted by dum spiro spero at 10:52 AM on September 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
If you have French, Assimil has an ancient Greek course. The Assimil approach is bite sized lessons with accompanying audio spoken slowly for every sentence given of the target language. Explanations are in French. But even if you don't have French, it sounds like it might be worth having for the ancient Greek audio alone.
posted by bertran at 3:33 PM on September 10, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by bertran at 3:33 PM on September 10, 2020 [2 favorites]
Do you want to learn Modern Greek to segue into Ancient Greek? If so, I'd recommend jumping into Ancient Greek straightaway for reasons elaborated below. If you want to learn both for their own sake, I'd challenge your assumption that they are similar enough and treat them both as their own thing with some similarities but essentially more different to each other than similar.
Greek is my first language and I l took Ancient Greek A level. Greek speakers often think of the two languages as very similar but there's shedloads of Ancient Greek taught in schools, and I think there's often not enough appreciation of how different the languages really are. When we translated Ancient Greek in school, it was slow and painstaking work. We had to move words around to create a more understandable Subject-Verb-Object form, identify mood and case, steer clear of false friends, all sorts. It wasn't obvious and it was hard work and I even speak a dialect of Greek that's closer to Ancient Greek than Standard Modern Greek. There's also more than one dialect of Ancient Greek, so Plato's Greek is different to Homer's Greek. I loved reading Ancient Greek texts in their original language and I think it's a worthwhile endeavour but I would treat them as two different languages with a shared ancestry.
Also, I don't know what the research literature says about learning two languages at the same time, but anecdotally Greek learners in Cyprus have struggled because of the simultaneous use of the dialect and standard Greek even though the differences between the two are smaller than differences between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek.
posted by mkdirusername at 4:47 PM on September 10, 2020 [5 favorites]
Greek is my first language and I l took Ancient Greek A level. Greek speakers often think of the two languages as very similar but there's shedloads of Ancient Greek taught in schools, and I think there's often not enough appreciation of how different the languages really are. When we translated Ancient Greek in school, it was slow and painstaking work. We had to move words around to create a more understandable Subject-Verb-Object form, identify mood and case, steer clear of false friends, all sorts. It wasn't obvious and it was hard work and I even speak a dialect of Greek that's closer to Ancient Greek than Standard Modern Greek. There's also more than one dialect of Ancient Greek, so Plato's Greek is different to Homer's Greek. I loved reading Ancient Greek texts in their original language and I think it's a worthwhile endeavour but I would treat them as two different languages with a shared ancestry.
Also, I don't know what the research literature says about learning two languages at the same time, but anecdotally Greek learners in Cyprus have struggled because of the simultaneous use of the dialect and standard Greek even though the differences between the two are smaller than differences between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek.
posted by mkdirusername at 4:47 PM on September 10, 2020 [5 favorites]
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Learn Ancient Greek with Prof. Leonard Muellner
Leonard Muellner (Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Brandeis University) and Belisi Gillespi present all the content covered in two semesters of a college-level Introduction to Ancient Greek course.
I hope that helps!
posted by thelonius at 9:25 AM on September 10, 2020 [3 favorites]