Introduction to Attic Greek

"I’ve put this book on the list because people learn in different ways and there are some people out there, some may call them masochists—I would not—who very much like to know every single thing about a concept or if we’ve talking about language, about linguistic forms or about parts of speech or syntax or grammatical constructions. They want to know everything about it right then, no matter how detailed or complicated it is; to have it dispensed all at one time, so that they can situate themselves in that landscape of all that material and arrange that for themselves before moving on to the next new thing. So this book is another textbook and it’s by Donald Mastronarde. It’s called Introduction to Attic Greek , and it’s published by Berkeley. It’s published significantly later than the first version of Reading Greek: it was published in 1993. And it says in the preface that it’s aimed at, if not university students, then students or potential learners of ancient Greek who feel very confident in their ability and want to get up to speed quickly. “Studying Greek introduced me to a lot of grammatical concepts which, technically, I should have learnt in high school.” Potentially this is a really good option for people who have some previous experience with other languages that are not their first language. I’d say particularly if you already have some exposure to Latin, this book is a good choice. Because ultimately, whether it’s Latin or a modern romance language, or German or any other language that has formal cases—that’s inflected—you’ve already been introduced to the concepts which are the bedrock of these languages as they’re taught. For that reason Mastronarde’s Introduction to Attic Greek would be an extremely good option for you. That’s a really good question and implies a really interesting approach to learning Greek which I completely agree with. You dip one toe into one pond and dip your other toe into the other pond. You start to confront the full complexity and majesty of the language at the same time as you’re learning forms and getting up to speed with it. It has a couple of benefits. The first benefit is that it shows you where your gaps are. If you pick up a full Greek text with a facing English translation, you may find yourself reading the English and perusing the Greek and feeling that perhaps you’re not ready for it yet. But, by the same token, it also acts as a motivator—to read Thucydides, to read some Plato . I suppose it’ll be different for each person. It really depends on what your motivation is to learn this language. If, at the start, you think, ‘I’m really interested in this particular concept or this part of history or the transmission of this idea’ and that’s why you want to read it, then a little thing like not completely understanding exactly how this language is written is not going to be a barrier to you. I think it’s important to confront yourself with your ability and where the ceiling of that ability currently stands and then, ideally, bust through it and set the ceiling a bit higher."