Reading Greek

"I think a really good place to start is with a seemingly formal textbook. It’s called Reading Greek and it’s published by Cambridge University Press. The revised edition of this textbook is very informal and very accessible. It introduces you, step by step, to each part of speech and each concept of the language, at a very manageable speed. And, most importantly—and I think this is the great triumph of the book—it’s in a very accessible order as well. It’s not the kind of textbook or learning experience where they throw every single minute detail about this particular verb or about this particular grammatical construction at you at one time and say, ‘Right, master all that’ and then move on to the next one. They introduce one very accessible part of a verb, or a noun, or a concept, or a grammatical construction and say ‘Right, okay, it won’t take you long to master that. Master that, and now we’ll give you the next part.’ So you build up your mastery of the language very much block-by-block, step-by-step. You feel very comfortable moving on to the next block or having it revealed to you what the next form is to learn because it’s not overwhelming in its detail. So the first version of this textbook was published in, I think, 1978. It doesn’t make it the frontline of learning. But inevitably, it must be part of it. You can’t learn any language without a bit of rote learning, that’s for sure. No, it definitely doesn’t mask the hard bits of learning ancient Greek by any means. But, at the same time, it doesn’t inflate how hard they are. In fact, it cushions the blow of how hard they are by the way that it introduces you to each new block in turn. You can’t get around rote learning, it’s just one of those things. But it pairs the inevitable rote learning with the right way of explaining concepts. That’s a brilliant observation. They do smuggle in the harder tenses under the guise of salacious jokes. Absolutely. Ultimately you feel there’s a person on the other side of the book. Particularly when it gets hard—as learning any difficult thing does—it’s strangely comforting to know that a human person sat down and wrote this and thought about you and how easy or difficult you might find the material when they were arranging it for you. It’s a very pleasant experience."