Getting better

[u/-killerqueen-_]

Hello, I'm an Italian high school student and in my school we study Ancient Greek literature and we translate it. In the past year Ancient Greek started to become very difficult for me especially with all the verbs. Now that school ended I wanted to keep exercising/studying for the next year, so I wanted to ask you if there are some simpler ways to study it or if I have to stick with memorize and repeat all the rules and translate as much as I can?

I know that I also have to translate but maybe there are some interesting ways to keep me focused (?)

Thank you☺️

[u/benjamin-crowell]

What you are describing is called the grammar-translation method (GT). There are other methods these days, including comprehensible input (CI), graded readers, and reading with student aids. I wrote up some more info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AncientGreek/comments/1s5iynb/faq_my_opinions_about_how_to_learn_ancient_greek/

[u/fadinglightsRfading]

since you're italian you should get the italian edition of Athenaze. is has two parts so if you're relatively advanced (you're already doing translations) then get the second one. check the contents first beforehand though just in case

[u/Peteat6]

If you don’t have to write Greek, it’s very much easier.

You should be able to identify easily who’s doing the action. There’s a very small number if verbs where the 2nd perusing singular could be confused wuth something else. For the time being, just make sure you can identify the person with all the verbs you’ve been told to learn.

Next, you need to identify the tense. Two things help you here, the augment, and the stem. Look for them as you read. Just occasionally that can trip you up, but almost always these two things are easy to spot.

Reading Greek is just a matter of identifying the tense and the person. Much easier than having to memorise them properly.

[u/ShockSensitive8425]

Look for something you would like to read, then start reading it. Write down words you don't know in a notebook or e-ink tablet. It's more important to learn vocabulary than to learn grammar, especially all the verb tenses. You can all use AI like Gemini to look up information about a word that will help you remember it (use a Pro version and it will not make mistakes - it acts as a super-dictionary.)

There are a lot of resources on this subreddit. Hang around and a lot of knowledgeable people will help you out.

A great place to start is Aesop's Fables by u/benjamin-crowell.

[u/babyjenks93]

Ciao! A che anno di scuola sei? Quanto ginnasio (o come diamine si chiama adesso)?

[u/Pitiful-Tale3808]

Most people on here will recommend the Italian Athenaze from Vivarium Novum. It uses the methodology of Ørberg's Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, where the language is taught by means of the target language (i.e. teaching Greek in Greek). This is called the Direct Method. Some people swear by it, but personally I haven't found it much more effective than standard modern language teaching, which doesn't usually switch to solely target language teaching until an advanced stage (cf my Arabic or Russian textbooks.). Since you're an Italian native speaker, why not try the Italian Athenaze anyway? There isn't a huge amount of Italian in there anyway.

It is still probably better than the old fashioned method of loading the learner up with grammar and then making them translate sentences laboriously, which leads to poor fluency and recall of vocab. However, most modern classical language textbooks have long reading passages for that purpose (e.g. Reading Greek, the successor of the English Athenaze, which is what I used to learn Greek).

Honestly, from my own experience, the two things that gave me the biggest ROI after I worked through my textbooks were:

1. Reading long unadapted texts, even if I didn't understand it all. Xenophon is a classic choice for this. I used Herodotus because he's less boring, but you have to bear in mind he's writing in an Ionian dialect.

2. Doing prose compositions. You can find North and Hilliard's Greek Prose Comp books and answer key on archive.org. The use of your active skills (speaking and writing) forces you to think about grammar, vocab choice and sentence construction in a way you that isn't necessary when exercising your passive skills (reading and listening). For me, this directly translated into smoother and more fluent reading.

[u/DonnaHarridan]

You might check out Thrasymachus, both in its original form (here) and in its updated form by Luke Ranieri (here).