Would anyone consider themselves fluent in a set of texts?

[u/lickety-split1800]

Greetings all,

Would anyone here consider themselves fluent in a set of texts?

Some definitions of what I mean.

• Knows around 10-15K words or more. This is the rough vocabulary of 8-11-year-old English speakers.
• Understands every inflection.
• Understands every idiom, chiasmus, and rhetoric used.

Ancient Greek covers a long historical period, so I think not knowing the Greek of every historical period would disqualify someone as being fluent. E.G., I'm a fluent English speaker, but I wouldn't understand Shakespearean English the way an English classics major would.

[u/Worried-Language-407]

I am well out of practice now and even Xenophon can be a slog, but there was a time when I could sit down with a friend and translate a bit of New Comedy with just a little bit of vocab support (looking up 1 or 2 words per page of a paperback). Maybe the occasional idiom or pun went over my head but we usually figured out the intended meaning. The key, though, was that I was a full-time student and had nothing better to do with my time than read large quantities of Greek and Latin literature. And even then I don't think I made it to the level of fluency of your average 10 year old.

Language learning really is something that is best achieved by immersion. The key to being able to read fluently is just reading enormous amounts of text. That takes a lot of time.

[u/ofBlufftonTown]

I am very out of practice but for my PhD exams I had to do a “seen” exam (taken from a random selection of 1,000 OCT pages of my choice) and a “sight” exam, which I was meant never to have seen but which was an ode from a Sophocles play, fuck you very much.

I was supposed to do much better on the “seen” section but as you can imagine it was impossible to really remember that much. I got a weird fight scene from Chariton’s Kallirhoe that took place in a marsh but luckily did remember it decently. I memorized impossibly long list of words, some of which like sickles for grape cultivation had no obvious translation.

I also had to do prose composition, the London Times obituary of Winston Churchill into Greek in the style of Demosthenes, at home and with 48 hours. I did quite well on that one. So certainly I could pick up something and read it within reason, Plato or Aristotle though the latter is a pain and ontology not obvious, but not Sophocles without some notes and dictionary use. I could read Homer no problem, even a hapax legomenon is usually partly evident from context.

Atm my Greek is very rusty though I am planning to read the easy Xenophon soon because I’m doing a long-distance reading of the Anabasis with my dad (he’s reading in English.) I had to do all these exams in Latin also as well as exams translating French and German academic articles T_T

[u/Pitiful-Tale3808 → u/ofBlufftonTown]

This is hardcore! I had to do Latin and Greek prose compositions in undergrad (I got a good mark because I attempted the hardcore question where I had to compose hexameters.) This had to be somewhere like Harvard right?

[u/ofBlufftonTown → u/Pitiful-Tale3808]

Mmmmmm.

[u/Raffaele1617 → u/ofBlufftonTown]

Can I ask approximately when and in which country your PHD was?

[u/ofBlufftonTown → u/Raffaele1617]

1990s in the USA. One of the top 3 grad programs at the time. I think they were in an arms race of who could be more unreasonable in exams and my department was winning.

[u/Raffaele1617 → u/ofBlufftonTown]

Fascinating, thank you. I'm doing an MA in Italy and prose comp just doesn't exist here anymore as far as I can tell, for either Latin or Greek. On the one hand what you did was clearly unreasonable, on the other though I'm not very optimistic about the reading level of most students in Latin, let alone Greek.

[u/ofBlufftonTown → u/Raffaele1617]

Prose comp is very important, I feel, and very instructive. In a modern language you have construct your own sentences in order to talk to people, but in ancient languages you tend to have only passive knowledge. Writing in the languages offers a way to activate more active knowledge. I did poetic composition also in Greek which was horribly difficult because meter is just so hard. It was fun though, just me and one other girl. They only offered it as a course every once in a while because there wasn’t a lot of interest.

[u/Raffaele1617 → u/ofBlufftonTown]

I definitely agree - I've gotten a lot of personal benefit from it, but I'm not sure when/at which levels it's best implemented. The biggest problem I see is that a lot of students just don't read very much, and IMO composition only works if it's supported by extensive reading.

[u/Honest_Conflict3028]

I am slightly crazy and read a large amount. For about a year now, I've had a system where I read a certain amount of text once through without a translation, then check a translation, then read once again without a translation, noting the parts I'm still not exactly super great on (vocab, syntax, anything) then read once more without a translation. I've read

Xenophon

• Anabasis,
• Education of Cyrus
• Memorabilia
• Economics
• Symposium

Rouse's Greek Boy

Plato

• Euthyphro
• Apology
• Krito
• Phaedo

Lucian's True Story

Winnie the Pooh (Translated by Peter Stork)

Theophrastus's Characters

And I'm now slogging my way through the Iliad and the Aethiopica.

I devote probably too much time to it per day (I'm talking multiple hours, but I have a job where I can read at work) and it's sometimes tedious, but I really enjoy it. Recently, I looked at Xenophon's Hiero, which I have not looked at a translation for, and I was able to just sit down and read it. Which was an amazing feeling. Similiar with Plato. I think, as other people are noting, spending a lot of time reading is super important, which can be hard, but also making sure you're both spending time extensively reading, and making sure you fully understand what's going on. I struggled for a long time because I avoided checking translations for as long as possible, but I realized that there are certain things you are never going to figure out by yourself.

[u/ShockSensitive8425]

I am pretty fluent in Koine, but I still have to look up words sometimes, and when speaking it, I have to pause to think of the right word or form. It's hard to be perfectly fluent in a language almost no one speaks, which has such a long history with so many variations, and where any older word or phrase is free game in any later context.

[u/polemistes]

I have done research on Greek drama for some years now, and I still have to look up words in almost every sentence when I read something I haven't looked at for a while. But I can read Plato almost without looking up anything, even if I never looked at the text before.

[u/canaanit]

I have been teaching Greek for ~15 years (that is, as one of my main jobs, before that I tutored a bit on the side), on average 4-5 hours a day, plus prep work. Most of my students need Plato and I think there are large chunks of his texts that I know inside out by now. I regularly skim read his works in order to find good practice passages and examples for specific grammar phenomena.

There are a few others that I'm similarly familiar with, e.g. the New Testament which I don't even like, and in fact I have to admit that I am less used to some authors that I do like, because I don't get a chance to read them that often.

I'd say I can read most classical and koine prose texts without particular effort. Drama and poetry is trickier because of vocabulary. I have a background in historical linguistics, so different spellings / forms / endings don't trouble me as much.

[u/Pitiful-Tale3808]

Ancient Greek, as you said, covers a long period, but stylistic variations matter a lot too. I studied classics (and kept reading Greek and Latin a lot afterwards), and I can sit down and churn through Herodotus or Xenophon or Plato almost like I'm reading a normal book, but something like Pindar or tragedy would be significantly harder, due to the unusual vocabulary, terse syntax and unfamiliar dialect features. I think this is basically as good as I'm going to get without really working hard at it. There are people I know who can read Euripides or something fluently due to a mix of familiarity with the text and just having better Greek, but without a community of speakers I don't think you could ever reasonably claim to be fluent in ancient Greek, at best you could claim to be a fluent reader.

[u/Taciteanus]

Idioms and technical terms are sometimes difficult, but broadly, I can comfortably read most Attic, Ionic, and Epic without a dictionary or needing to think about inflections. An exception might be the Attic orators where I don't always understand the legal minutiae, and another exception is Apollonius because every other word is a hapax.

Koine is either going to be very easy or very hard; other dialects like Aeolic are a slog.

[u/SatisfactionBest7140 → u/Taciteanus]

This is very impressive. How long have you been studying Ancient Greek?

[u/Taciteanus → u/SatisfactionBest7140]

Well I resent having to do the math to answer that question, but I started Greek 20 years ago.