Appetitive: Greek Paedegogy

The other day, I was at a book shop and I ran into the new edition of Mastronarde's Greek textbook, Introduction to Attic Greek. It's a very pretty book and it made me think about Greek textbooks. I've been reviewing my Greek grammar in preparation for starting grad school in the fall and I've been thinking about what introductory textbook I would use if I were teaching a introductory Greek course.

Although I know that Hansen & Quinn is the standard,I just don't find it particularly user-friendly. In the early chapters, the sentences are insipid and repetitive. Also, it seems severely front-loaded with forms (chapters 1-5 force almost all of the verb forms upon students, while units 6-11 slow down the pace, and then chapter 12 and 13 try to teach all of the irregular verb patterns). While it's a great text for review, I can't imagine it being much fun for someone starting out with Greek. However, I learned with Athenaze, which, while being fun, was a complete disaster for anyone trying to learn the language.

Egnatius learned with Reading Greek, which I've taken a look at a couple of times. While I like the idea of starting students off with large reading passages, there are some serious issues with the book (such as that it teaches only 5 principle parts-- which I think makes life more difficult than it has to be).

Egnatius left a number of books here because he's coming back for graduate school in the fall. One of them of his copy of the Teach Yourself Guides' Complete Ancient Greek. For the last few days I've been looking it over and I've found it really enjoyable. It's nice for a few reasons. First, it seems that it allots the amount of grammar that it teaches in each chapter pretty evenly so it doesn't feel like an overload at any point. The exercises are fun and interesting. Furthermore, the book is half the price or less than any of the other textbooks on the market. However, there are a few strange things. The explanation of contract verbs is too rushed and would be very problematic for anyone who hasn't learned Greek already (Betts 40-41). I think that this is a problem of the Teach Yourself series in general (I found a similar problem with verb explanations in Complete Sanskrit). However, a teacher might be able to remedy this. There are also one or two of the grammatical explanations that bothered me. I will probably be putting those up on the blog over the next few days.

Anyone have a favorite Greek textbook?

Appetitive: New Standard Translations

I had a really bad day, which capped off a really bad week, which capped off a really bad couple of months. But, tonight, I'm going to a lecture by Mark Griffiths and Glen Most on the new standard Greek Tragedy series which will replace the old Greene and Lattimore set. I'm really excited by the prospect of hearing what they have to say. I had the good fortune of getting to preview some of the material and it looks good (although I have a few quibbles with parts of the Persians). I will read more and add some commentary after the lecture. Needless to say, I think the new crop of students reading Greek Tragedy for the first time will have a great resource.

Things I Didn't Know: Tenses in Latin (Reasoning)

Since I haven't been able to post much, I thought I would post a few short notes now and again about things I encounter in my study of classics that I didn't know before. I encountered a few doing my Latin Prose Composition homework.

Bradley's Arnold: 180 [1]: dum (while) always takes an historical present when it denotes the time within which something occurs. I'm not sure if this was something I just missed or if it actually wasn't in my Latin textbook, but this was news to me. Amusingly enough, I bought this textbook used and the person who had the textbook before me circled this as well.

181: The Latin perfect cannot express the equivalent of the English "I have been doing"," so the Romans used the present plus an adverb connoting the idea of the past for the same effect. Teh adverbs are iampridem, iamdiu, and iamdudum. This definitely did not show up in my Latin textbook, but i also can't think of a situation when I've run across it "in the wild" so I guess I can't really blame Moreland and Fleischer for the oversight.

Notes:

1. Bradley's Arnold references are by paragraph number, not by page.

Appetitive: Reading For Pleasure

Have you ever tried to read a Greek or Latin text for pleasure? I have, but usually after the first hour or so, I put it down. It's not that I don't like reading Greek and Latin...I love it. But when I'm not compelled to do it for a class, it can become really frustrating. And worse, it's not about how hard the Greek or the Latin is, it's usually about my vocabulary.

When I read a Greek text, for example, I have to sit at my desk with the text, a commentary, All The Greek Verbs, the LSJ (or a smaller dictionary), Smyth, and sometimes various other references. After a while, I just get sick of flipping through pages. For school, I have to do it which forces me to power through, but it's just too many things to look up when reading for pleasure; especially when reading for pleasure only comes as a brief break from reading for school.

One of the solutions to this is old elementary and middle school textbooks. When I was in ireland I picked up a little copy of Xenephon's Anabasis, Book I, that was edited for children. It has a vocabulary in the back, a commentary, and it's slightly simplified. It also has the added benefit of being pocket sized, so sometimes I take it around with me and read when I have a few free minutes.

Even better, I found, are the texts on Geoffrey Steadman's website. The texts are unaltered (with the exception of a typo here and there). There's a list of core vocab at the beginning of each one, which must be memorized, but everything else is glossed. The commentary explains any wording that is even remotely difficult. Of course, Steadman rarely explains the reasoning behind the constructions, so it's nice to have Smyth or a big dictionary on hand, but it's nice to be able to just sit there with my kindle and read Republic Book I (only needing to flip back and forth between text and facing vocabulary). I hope that in the future, I'll spend more time reading Greek for pleasure. And maybe someday my vocabulary will be decent enough that I can do this with an OCT. Maybe...

Back Soon

Applications are in, GRE scores have arrived, still waiting for news. Midterms start this week. Hopefully after that, I'm going to start blogging again. I'm probably going to start with some notes on Latin prose composition.

Back soon.

Appetitive: Cool Manuscript Research

I'm supposed to be working on an article about knowledge in the Meno and the Theaetetus right now, but instead I've been reading, flitting from one thing to another.

One of the things I found this morning was a post on the Homer Multitext about a group of undergraduates at Brown who were given a thus-undecoded set of  notes in archaic shorthand by Roger Williams, founder of the colony of Rhode Island and the First Baptist Church. The students actually managed to not only decode it, but find that it contained a great deal of historically relevant information about the Baptist church. I think it's pretty awesome that they let undergraduates do the work, and it's wonderful that the digitization of old and ancient manuscripts allows a much wider range of individuals to work on primary sources.

Appetitive: It's Been a While...and Sanskrit

It's been quite a while. Now I'm back and I'm going to try to stay sane enough to post fairly regularly. Perhaps it will keep me sane.

One of the things I learned this last quarter is that Sanskrit is really hard, and, no one seems to like any of the books out on the market right now. I liked Sanskrit, but I'm not going to continue to take it because it takes up too much time for something that is not in my area of interest. However, I realized that the reason it took up so much time is that I basically had to rewrite the book for myself and gather information from other resources to supplement it.

My guides are far from complete, but I realized that if I put them up online, people could benefit from the many, many, many hours I spent making them and it might make Sanskrit an easier process for beginners or people trying to teach themselves. I realize this sounds presumptuous-- because it is; it is somewhat unreasonable that I, with only one quarter of Sanskrit, would be able to help other people. I do not pretend I know anything-- I just thought I would reorganize the information already out there into a more easily digestible form. I also would be more than happy for help/corrections/etc.

It's going to take a while to convert my notes into a distributable format. I've started doing this, but it will be a little while before I am able to post it.

 

I used Perry's Sanskrit Primer, both because it was my textbook for class, and because it is both cheap (book form) and free (PDF form). I did a lot of my supplementary reading out of Complete Sanskrit, but I also occasionally used William Dwight Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar (PDF).

More classically related things soon. Happy holidays, everyone.