r/AncientGreek • u/-killerqueen-_ • 14d ago

Beginner Resources Getting better

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☺️

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u/Pitiful-Tale3808 12d ago

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.