If you want to learn to read and speak Ancient Greek, Latin, Biblical Hebrew, or Old English in fun, immersive classes, sign up for lessons at AncientLanguage.com 🏺📖 Why exactly is it so hard to learn Ancient Greek? While learning Latin poses no small challenge, those who have learned the first language of the Romans often find the Hellenic tongue to be strikingly difficult by comparison, for reasons never quite clear. In this video, I summarize all the greatest challenges and pitfalls of studying Ancient Greek, I explain why Ancient Greek is much harder to learn than Latin for the majority of people, much more than they expect, at least, and most importantly I tell you how you can remedy these problems and become a fluent reader of Ancient Greek, once and for all. The Ranieri-Roberts Approach to Ancient Greek: ua-cam.com/video/2vwb1wVzPec/v-deo.html C. T. Hadavas editions of the Ancient Greek novels: Xenophon of Ephesus, An Ephesian Tale: amzn.to/3BoozCh Chariton, Callirhoe: amzn.to/3BoUiTR Longus, Daphnis and Chloe: amzn.to/47S1DHK Geoffrey Steadman Ancient Greek literature editions: Plato's Symposium: amzn.to/3MWs2dK Euripides' Bacchae: amzn.to/3XIqklk Euripides' Medea: amzn.to/3ZzmCwT Plato's Apology: amzn.to/3Xzw0Og Plato's Phaedo: amzn.to/4evKEwU Plato's Republic I: amzn.to/3XxuCMd Plato's Meno: amzn.to/3BgruNh Plato's Phaedo: amzn.to/4ezET1i Lysias I and Plato's Crito: amzn.to/47EtQRW Xenophon's Anabasis Book 1: amzn.to/4edHbDx Xenophon's Anabasis Book 4: amzn.to/4dju0iS Sophocles' Antigone: amzn.to/3MXnMdY Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus: amzn.to/4dj7Zku Homer's Iliad 6 and 22: amzn.to/3XvmThA Homer's Odyssey 6-8: amzn.to/47CNDkU Homer's Odyssey 9-12: amzn.to/47F4Zhe Herodotus Histories Book 1: amzn.to/4ej31FO Genesis 1-11: Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate: amzn.to/3XSEhOz Iliad 100: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/iliad-100-homers-iliad-book-1-lines-1-100 Gospel of John: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/gospel-of-john-english-latin-greek-trilingual-audiobook-text Judgement of the Goddesses: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/lucians-judgement-of-the-goddesses-in-6-ancient-greek-pronunciations Ancient Greek is easy...GOTCHA! ua-cam.com/video/XI66x0bISJ8/v-deo.html 🦂 Support my work on Patreon: www.patreon.com/LukeRanieri 📚 Luke Ranieri Audiobooks: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com 🤠 Take my course LATIN UNCOVERED on StoryLearning, including my original Latin adventure novella "Vir Petasātus" learn.storylearning.com/lu-promo?affiliate_id=3932873 🦂 Sign up for my Latin Pronunciation & Conversation series on Patreon: www.patreon.com/posts/54058196 ☕ Support my work with PayPal: paypal.me/lukeranieri And if you like, do consider joining this channel: ua-cam.com/channels/Lbiwlm3poGNh5XSVlXBkGA.htmljoin 🏛 Latin by the Ranieri-Dowling Method: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/latin-by-the-ranieri-dowling-method-latin-summary-of-forms-of-nouns-verbs-adjectives-pronouns-audio-grammar-tables 🏺Ancient Greek by the Ranieri-Dowling Method: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/ancient-greek-by-the-ranieri-dowling-method-latin-summary-of-forms-of-nouns-verbs-adjectives-pronouns-audio-grammar-tables 🏛 Ancient Greek in Action · Free Greek Lessons: ua-cam.com/play/PLU1WuLg45SixsonRdfNNv-CPNq8xUwgam.html 👨🏫 My Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata playlist · Free Latin Lessons: ua-cam.com/video/j7hd799IznU/v-deo.html 🦂 ScorpioMartianus (my channel for content in Latin, Ancient Greek, & Ancient Egyptian) ua-cam.com/users/ScorpioMartianus 🎙 Hundreds of hours of Latin & Greek audio: lukeranieri.com/audio 🌍 polýMATHY website: lukeranieri.com/polymathy/ 🌅 polýMATHY on Instagram: instagram.com/lukeranieri/ 🦁 Legio XIII Latin Language Podcast: ua-cam.com/users/LegioXIII 👕 Merch: teespring.com/stores/scorpiomartianus 🦂 www.ScorpioMartianus.com 🦅 www.LukeRanieri.com 📖 My book Ranieri Reverse Recall on Amazon: amzn.to/2nVUfqd Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart, conducted by Neville Mariner 00:00 Intro 1:10 Alphabet & diacritics 4:32 Morphology, stem changes, augments 10:08 Heterogeneity of the target literature 13:12 The Textbooks & Readers 18:19 The BIGGEST Problem is... 25:09 How to solve the problem 30:20 You’re not gonna like this 41:16 Why the Ranieri-Roberts Approach is so effective 46:53 The most important thing I should tell you 48:35 HOW to read 54:57 How to begin reading real Ancient Greek literature 58:29 Bilingual texts are NOT cheating 1:10 Tentative Reading Plan #ancientgreek #greek #ancientgreece
Dude i really appreciate your efforts BUT... Your accent and your pronunciation are very bad... You cannot analyse a language like that. For example the EFYGON it s not epewgon😂 You pronounced it this way... It s E-feeghon,the correct way. I understand i m not expecting from you to talk like Socrates BUT indirectly you re mispronouncing also modern greek.
@@EmpireOfLEMBERG You shouldn't be correcting someone, if you don't have the knowledge yourself: His pronunciation as an emphatic P is the historic attic pronunciation, it only became a fricative F in the later Koine period. So no buddy, his pronunciation is exactly correct. The υ is only pronounced as ee (as in "bee") in the later koine to byzantine period, certainly not in attic pronunciation, before that it was pronounced as the french u in "tu" or as the german ü in "Tüte". Luke has multiple videos on his channel with a wide variety of pronunciations - he has videos in attic, in koine, in byzantine and even in modern greek pronunciation.
It amazes me how many extremely helpful videos about learning Ancient Greek you've released in just ONE year: detailed 2.5-hour Lucian pronunciation guide, Ranieri-Roberts guide for autodidacts, macronizing guide, Iliad recitation guide+Kephalos challenge, and now this video! And this year isn't even over yet! You have single-handedly eliminated the excuse that there are no accessible entry-level materials about Ancient Greek on the web. You are truly a gift to humanity, Luke!
whtas do you say..????.ALL GREECE KNOW THAT ATHENS SPOKEN ALBANIAN TILL 1930.................ALSO TODAY IN GREECE SPEAK MAJORITIES IN ALBANIAN...............................THE MITOLOGY IN GREECE SPEAK ONLY ALBANIAN..!!!...ua-cam.com/video/hmZjeU599MQ/v-deo.html&pp=ygUbbWl0b2xvZ3kgYWxiYW5pYW4gaW4gZ3JlZWNl
I will say that reading the book of Revelation in the Bible was the single most gripping experience I've ever had reading Greek. I got to chapter 8 and literally couldn't put it down. It's so vivid and there are so many intriguing things happening in quick succession if you can get past some of the mild disconnected-ness of it.
whtas do you say..????.ALL GREECE KNOW THAT ATHENS SPOKEN ALBANIAN TILL 1930.................ALSO TODAY IN GREECE SPEAK MAJORITIES IN ALBANIAN...............................THE MITOLOGY IN GREECE SPEAK ONLY ALBANIAN..!!!...ua-cam.com/video/hmZjeU599MQ/v-deo.html&pp=ygUbbWl0b2xvZ3kgYWxiYW5pYW4gaW4gZ3JlZWNl
hi, luke!! just wanted to let you know i have beaten cancer and even rung the bell!! the last video i watched before the ceremony was the gladiator ii video
I was lucky growing up with German and English, and learning French and Italian at school. Later on, I also learnt Russian. When I needed to do a year of Latin, I found it surprisingly easy, with a lot if vocabulary from French and Italian, and a lot of grammar from German and especially Russian.
Why is Latin so hard? I speak like 7 modern languages, many of which are more difficult than Latin, yet I still struggle a lot with this ancient tongue. Why is Latin so hard? I think it comes down to something similar; dead languages are much more inconvenient to learn. If there were lots of dubs in Latin, lots of easy, but compelling works of fiction (which there are not past the beginning to early intermediate stages!), lots of people to practice with, I am sure it would be a lot easier.
I actually think Latin is quite easy in some ways (until you start learning all the verb conjugations lol), do you mind if I ask you what languages you speak and which one is your mother tongue?
@@jorgitoislamico4224 My native language is Danish, and I speak the following languages (in order of proficiency): English, German, Russian, French, Spanish, Swedish and a little Mandarin Chinese.
@@SouthPark333Gaming Well Danish is quite different from Latin so no wonder why it was harder for you, my native language is Spanish so I found Latin to be slightly easier to learn that let's say German for example (I'm still learning both tho) but considerably harder than Portuguese or Italian.
@@jorgitoislamico4224 I am conversationally fluent in almost all the other language I just listed and know the grammar very well. I do not find Latin difficult; I find it more inconvenient and therefore harder than most modern languages.
I can really recommend the "Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine" written by Constantinus Tischendorf from 1842. It's a side-by-side Greek and Latin version of the new testament. If you can already read Latin well, you can use the Latin to understand the Greek. The Latin translation is so literal that it is extremely useful. I am now reading Mark after (almost) fimishing volume 1 of Athenaze. There are some things that confuse me in the Greek, but most is understood and it is a very nice break from Athenaze
@@Roma_eterna For me, it is the second google entry if I search with "Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine Tischendorf" (the first one too, but that one includes handwritten notes) I don't know where I got it from. It sat on my PC for years before I finally decided to use it :)
Luke, you may have a new beginner Greek student here. I studied classical Greek some ‘centuries’ ago from a prof as old as Euripides who took on the beginner classes because the TAs would show off and give students a hard time. So, he lead us through the declensions like taking a bath. He used a text from some primary school in bygone years with brief texts. Brief exercises. Brief chapters that limited new info to one grammatical item in the chapter instead of say 10 in modern textbooks with 20 page chapters. My happiest class at college. I may be willing to restart.
17:03 smoothest transition ever, even without the drums! No one could, with a straight face, call me good at Latin and while I am proud to say I can understand John Charity Spring for the most part, Minecraftium is definitely my high watermark, but even with all that said, boy do I feel inadequate after watching your videos. You're an inspiration, Luke! Ah, well, who knows, one day, I may even finish il metodo natura. :)
The biggest lie/scam that we're told is that bilingual texts are cheating when we know that the ancients themselves used such materials in their own second-language acquisition. Indeed, one of my greatest resources has been my Latin-Greek New Testament; the claim that the Evangelists are an excellent first step in a Greek reading plan is 100% true in my personal experience.
I have become convinced of the same! In Second Language Acquisition theory, it is definitely well established that it is better to stay in the target language whenever possible, especially when explaining grammar, and certainly when conveying meaning. Thus we must use bilingual texts effectively: learn the meaning of whatever passage, then read the target language original; understand everything about it. Then see if, upon reading it solely in the original, you can understand it all. Similarly, if we use Familia Romana or another Latin-only reader, we need to eventually be able to read the text without looking at any of the notes or pictures for meaning. That is what builds confidence and competence. Since any of the Greek “PER SE ILLUSTRATA” readers are mediocre to terrible, they are almost useless, robbing us of confidence as often as they seem to give it. I’m quite disillusioned with them having completed that grand spreadsheet. It seems there are many paths up Mount Parnassus.
2:37-2:41 Really looking forward to those as well as to more videos about evidence for the pronunciation of the other diphthongs you haven't covered yet!
I was learning using an online course for Ancient Greek called Lingua GRAECA Per Se Illustrata and I found myself in this exact same place 😭 I didn't know if I found it so much more difficult to learn than Latin because I wasn't smart enough, because the language was just harder or because the course was just not good enough for me, I'm glad you decided to finally answer my question lol good video as always
However in all honesty... Ancient greek is the hardest language. I m not saying it from the aspect of patriotism but it s the hardest one💯💯 NOT even greeks can speak it...
@@EmpireOfLEMBERG Oh no I had already studied the alphabet before and I can read it pretty much as easily as the Latin alphabet, it was the grammar that was hard Also, why do you have a menorah if you're Greek? I thought Greeks were Christian.
@@lushu3943 Well, I don't think Greek and Jewish Greek are the same, Greek Jews are Jews living in Greece, and Greeks are the descendants of Ancient Greeks
@@polyMATHY_Luke And you are so very right about this state of disconnect that Anglophones will have with Greek, ancient or modern. When I was growing up my Mum took me from New Zealand to Paris where she worked as a personal secretary for one of the Secretaries General of the OECD. One day I went in to meet her for lunch and we were traversing through one of the tunnels under the chateau there and we came across some of the ladies of the Greek delegation whom she had obviously met before this. Mum was always very proud to present me to any Greek, but I think should have been more proud of the perfect immaculate Greek that she mastered learning off my Greek Father. I could see that these ladies held her in esteem for her use of their language as not many non-Greeks learn Greek nowadays, especially Anglos, and especially ones from NZ. But for me watching on, this was "all Greek" to me. I felt this disconnexion to it that I didn't get with the ease I had learning French there, or, like you, German at school. Because there were no free lunches it turns out. Well, these last three years I have been learning Greek at the local Orthodox church here in Auckland. I can now read Greek with ease and learn many new words on a quotidian basis. You say "read, read and then read". I do this and I also learn Greek songs on YT and sing along to them. And now, for me, I get these free lunches with Greek, and with that example with η θέα these are small ways of broaching this large disconnect between us speaking English and learning the Greek tongue. So, thanks again (and sorry about the the wall of text, but you inspired me here).🙏🏽
Great video so far Luke. I'm about 25 minutes in and it's all so interesting. Again thank you for the inspiration and the expertise you bring. I tried to learn ancient Greek and got stuck on lesson 3 or 4 of The Great Course ciriculum. It was the case system, it was hard to comprehend. Then I noticed the same teacher also taught Latin! So I began Latin to take a break from Greek's case system... ... *sigh*... In this moment I realized there was no escape 😢. But the case system was much easier to learn using a English alphabet! Currently im in chapter 19 of LLPSI and I love all of your videos.
I'm a greek native speaker and sometimes I was so frustrated in my Ancient-Greek learning course comparing the progress I made reading through Oerberg's books about Latin. I used to start from early Greek authors who were writing in Kathareuousa going back all the way to Greek-Koine. I felt that there was a huge gap between those two, maybe because Kathareuousa in my eyes was seen as something "man-made/fictional". Watching your approach I know that patience is the key and if I want a more complete approach I should start your method through the excel file I had obtained in another video. Also there is a useful Latin-Greek-French parallel reader that may be useful. Thanks for the amount of time you spent giving us advices about the matter Luke!
I found your channel through metatron. 10:06 Made me feel so much better as just a mom learning Koine Greek to read the new testament. Learning alone. So much fun, but very confusing at first.....still. I'll pick it up though. I'm using biblioliguo and videos like this.
Thank you Luke for another great video! I'm also learning ancient greek with help of ,,alexandros" , athenaze or lingua graeca per se illustrata :) Thanks for good adivises!!
What makes a language hard to learn is not the complexity of the grammar, but its irregularity. That's why Turkish is so much easier to learn than Greek - its grammar is far more complex, but it is almost perfectly regular.
Man Korean has so many weird pronunciation rules and exceptions from the one year I took, I think it's mostly regulated but definitely some exceptions. I actually found French way easier once I learned a lot of the rules for phonetics because there's a lot but they're super consistent. The grammar not quite as much.
Learning both Greek and Italian at the same time, and I even being beginner to intermediate, I can't even IMAGINE attempting Ancient Greek OR Latin, thank you for your beautifully passionate videos, from us - as passionate - language learners! 😌
As a modern Greek learner, I found his pronunciation confusing to say the least. Like I recognise the letters, and some of the components are familiar. So I would have read αποφευγην as apofevgyn, not apopeogyn. I've always found Greek eu = ev to English (and in my own Dutch) eu like in Europe to be easy enough to understand as a simple transposition of letters that would look very similar when chiseled in stone. Eu being eo, not so much. Did pronunciation really change that much?
@@CitizenMio this is a big debate. Some scholars think it has, some think it hasn’t. In the video, the Erasmian pronunciation is used, which again is debatable. If you ask me, the truth is somewhere in the middle. You have to understand that there was no unified Ancient Greek language, but various dialects. In some, the use of the aspirated “h” was already in decline. Others had already done away with the use of the “w” sound in front of certain words. Many of these changes toward the modern Greek pronunciation were already happening since ancient times, so, who knows exactly how Ancient Greek was pronounced, when first and foremost, there was no such thing as a unified Ancient Greek language that kids learned in school. Today, those who wish to learn Ancient Greek, a standard reconstructed pronunciation has been developed for the sake of standardization, especially for non-modern Greek speakers. In Greece, only the modern Greek pronunciation is used to render Ancient Greek. In my opinion from what I have read, I believe that there were definitely differences in pronunciation between ancient and modern Greek, but the shift to the modern Greek pronunciation was already happening since the classical times. So, having said all that, I don’t think that the differences were so stark such as the reconstructed pronunciation used in this video, which sounds very foreign to modern Greek ears. It sounds like a German trying to speak Greek. If anything, if someone wants to have an understanding of the pronunciation of Ancient Greek, they should use modern Greek as a reference, not some random reconstructed version of it. Someone may argue that languages and pronunciations change through time, and I agree, but you have to understand that Greek as a language is VERY conservative. The fact that without training, a modern Greek can understand 80% of a Koine Greek sentence, two forms of the Greek language removed by a span of 2000 years, speaks volumes!
@@jimatreidēsIn any case, using modern pronunciations for ancient texts of the same language is very common. In Spanish, for example, we read everything according to each one's accent and no one really uses the pronunciation of 16th century to read the more classic literature of our language. I think the best thing is to look for optimal conventions, especially on the part of current Greeks, for very anachronistic whether to use one pronunciation or another, at least we shall not "waste the time" with these debates, which confuse, above all, many new learners
1:45 Funny; I learned the (Russian) Cyrillic alphabet, in about half an hour. Yet, in Greek alphabet, I’m still hot-dog water, after years. I guess, because I’ve never officially studied Greek, in a classroom. 😅
You’ve inspired me once again to get back into it! I’ve been doing a lot of Sanskrit studying the past few years, and sometimes I get discouraged by that, like will I ever be able to just read??? But then I get back into Latin and Greek and it feels like there’s just so much more material to help with reading fluency. This was a great outline of a reading plan, very helpful.
Grazie, Luke! Una volta finito con i miei studi, riprenderò il greco antico. Le recensioni di libri che fai sono fantastiche, e comprerò sicuramente ὁ Φάρος e cercherò di imparare un po' ogni giorno. Es gibt so viele Dinge, die ich lernen will, aber wie es aussieht, muss ich mir einen Plan erstellen und hoffen, dass alles klappt. 😆 ευχαριστώ, διδάσκαλε.
For me, the hardest part of ancient Greek has always been the unrelatability of the vocab. As a native Dutch speaker growing up with English, a lot of Romance vocabulary was familiar from the start, making Latin much more accessible.
He nailed the problems, lack of cognates and lack of lots of reading material. I learned Greek via Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek. He takes you through Book I of the Iliad. After that it took me years to get through the rest of the Iliad and the Odyssey, using Cunliffe's Lexicon of the Homeric dialect. Painfully slow, but it was more interesting to read great epic poetry painfully slowly than to zip through page after page of paradigmatic sentences. Latin at least has a bunch of fun translations of modern novels into Latin on which you can work up reading fluency - Pride and Prejudice, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, The Hobbit, Harry Potter, etc. For Greek, there's slim pickings (Harry Potter in Attic). And in a modern language like portuguese you can just work up speed and fluency by reading fun modern novels (e.g. Jorge Amado) one after the other.
Thank you, Luke. The moment I started typing this, I realized I have way too much to say to put in a YT comment. Anyways, I was encouraged by this video and accidentally watched the entire thing. I have been climbing the Greek mountain for a while with pretty dismal progress (in my estimation). Spanish was so much easier.
Don't forget Euclid! He wrote early Koine; the dual is conspicuously absent (δυσιν ορθιαις ισαι εισιν instead of δυοιν ορθιαιν whatever the verb would be). I'm a mathematician. I had a Teach Yourself book in which Element 1:15 (Εαν δυο ευθειαι τεμνωσιν αλληλας...) and the part of Anabasis where a Rhodian suggests catching 2000 animals and making mollags to cross the river were passages.
_Thank you_ for this. I am glad i watched through it and now feel more encouraged to try again. In the description text, the tentative reading plan should probably be at 1:01:10, not 1:10.
25:08 I’ve felt the same way. Recently I’ve even wanted to find some way to get a list of cognates. I remember Keller & Russel giving cognates in English to Greek words that did not seem similar at all but it was cool to see nevertheless & even that helps me personally.
Any technique that works, is valuable. For me, I think the solution is to encounter the text in entertaining narratives. That way you remember the word from context.
What are the most surprising cognates? I don't have a most surprising cognate, but here are some cognates: φρέαρ - burn (in names like Washburn, maybe also fire burn but that's not certain) ομίχλη - мгла (the initial ο represents a laryngeal lost in Russian) μισθός - meed (reward).
χάριν σοι οἶδα : The theme is so close to my heart. My major complain to academia has been : "why the heck not to create so many textbooks, with gradually increasing complexity which would let us eventually much less painfully attack something like Phado. But this is possible in an ideal world. I think, with the absence of my dreamy eventualities, your advice may be very good. I will really try to get through Steadman's edition of Symposium without relying on gloss.. I did that with Shakespeare ones. Also I want to reread John similarly..
I hit a barrier with Latin. But at the same time found I was fine with the Vulgate Bible. So I read in the Vulgate with ease. Now, obviously, Vulgate Latin differs in some respects to Classical Latin. But there's a massive overlap of both grammar and vocab (but obviously differences as well). When I started out I couldn't read the Vulgate Bible. Now I can. My conjecture is this. If you become competent and fluent reading the Vulgate Bible it will be eadier to approach other forms. Because the content is a stepping stone. So my adapted conjecture applies the same to Greek. This approach starts out from Koine Greek and the Bible. Other people might have different starting point. But the principle is the same. My conjecture here is that if you're an accomplished Koine reader you will do reasonably well in other Ancient Greek but you'll need sone adaptation, but you won't be starting from scratch. Boiling down the conjecture. You do well to read a lot of stuff that is accessible to you. Btw. I am a big fan of the idea of adaptation of original works. Sad it's not done much. This for every language including one's own! Adaptation should be done a lot more to my mind. Final point. Rereading is for me a religion. Things don't come on first pass. Take away. You need to become a reader. You need to fluent at reading something. Totally agree. John is a lot easier than Luke, btw. Might be a good progression. While on Luke, worth thinking sbout Acts of the Apostles. Same author as Luke (I think), part faith, part mythology, part historical novel. Higher literary style.
You should interview Stanford historian Victor Davis Hanson about this and other topics regarding ancient Greece and Rome. It would be such a fascinating interview!
Since i speak sanskrit too. i found it alot easier if i adopted the sanskrti method to study greek where i started from root and aorist first. (I can elaborate) like using the process of gunation in greek since its really similar for us like bhuž is root it comes bhauž / bhāuž. where bhauž became bhoj and bhāuž bhauj
Just about sums up what I've concluded about learning a new language. Pronunciation can usually be summed with a short article, and after that it becomes a matter of practice. Grammar can be trickier, because you can always find some weird quirk you might not expect (why can I be _in_ my house, but _at_ my home?), but at the end of the day even the most complex system is learnable. The biggest obstacle, however, is just the sheer size of vocabulary you have to acquire, remember, and recall in a second to be in any way functioning in a language. Pronunciation and grammar are mostly finite processes, but acquiring vocabulary is a struggle with no end in sight, to some extent even with your native language.
Interlinear is the best I can do in any foreign language, because it cuts the non-vocabulary complexity. I'm sure I could get to a "foreign only" level, but that would just take more hours than I am willing to commit. Also, a word of encouragement, composing simple sentences in your new language is great too.
3:25 The illegibility of the readings get worse in some modern typefaces designed for Modern Greek, with polytonic an afterthought. There for legibility of the modern script the relative x-height is typically large, meaning that the diacritics are further minimized. Some sans serif faces adopt square quotes like those found in Helvetica's commas, further reducing the part that distinguishes the breathings to a diminutive tail! This is not a problem for modern greek, but a serious issue indeed for polytonic! One additional thing is that I observe that the diacritics in Byzantine texts are usually large and ample, so this is quite something introduced in the evolution of writing technology to metal typesetting.
Thank you! I got along better after I conceded that acquiring Greek is was just going to take twice as long as acquiring Latin, no matter what methods I used. I glanced at an interesting study recently -- can't for the life of me remember where I saw it -- that suggested that the cognitive drag of using an unfamiliar alphabet remains a factor for much longer than you're aware of it being a factor: a new alphabet slows down your reading even months after you have supposedly mastered it. -- But I think you're right, it's the paucity of cognates that's the real killer.
I have learned (putonghua-mandarin) Chinese to a b2 level but Ancient Greek and koine Greek which I’ve studied for years I can’t even understand a word just sounding out words is difficult
Today after the service I sat next to the preacher and read Acts 27:9,10 in Greek, then handed him the book. He read it with somewhat less fluency and a more archaic pronunciation. I picked that passage because today is the Fast and everyone in the room recently experienced a hurricane (but the one mentioned in that chapter occurred after the Fast).
As someone who was raised bilingual (English and Spanish), I can say when I started to actually try to learn Italian, modern Greek, ancient Greek, and Latin it sounded very familiar to me, and the pronunciations came naturally at least for Italian, modern Greek, and Latin (Classical Greek much harder for me though lol), I can also say this for Arabic as a Spanish speaker, it was influenced by Arabic for almost 1,000 years in Spain. Just give it a try folks, it's not that scary to fail and sound dumb, sometimes it's funny and you make good friends.
Unfortunately we don't know the original pronunciation of that greek Language... Everything s just speculations. However we just speak them based on the modern greek accent and more precisely on the accent of Athens.
I have joked for decades that all languages are equally hard because the difficulty of learning vocabulary is so much greater than all the other difficulties. Indeed, I think that the real advantage of Esperanto is not the simplified grammar but the agglutinative word-building tools. Not only does it mean that learning a fewer number of roots helps you parse so much vocabulary, it also makes it easier to periphrastically construct words that'll be understood when you don't know the "proper" term. So, yeah, I agree that more cognates with your native language is a huge part of how hard a language will be for you to learn.
If English did not have a large Latin vocabulary, and so a student had to learn equal amounts of vocabulary for either language, I actually think Greek would be easier than Latin because the syntax can more closely match that of English. Verbs don't by default go at ends of sentences. Participial constructions are more diverse like that of English. Articles are super helpful. Sentences are broken up with enclitics and conjunctions more frequently, and one doesn't find sentences running as long in Greek through (over)use of relative pronouns.
Hello Luke [I don’t suppose you’ll see this as this video is old but worth a try anyway] I tried learning AG some years ago, technically it was two semesters as part of my history degree, and it was a complete bust. My instructor employed the grammar-translation method (Luschnig specifically 😅) and honestly I didn’t retain much post my exams, and certainly couldn’t read anything of substance. I mourn this because I have always loved the dramas and wanted to read them in the original AG but we got nowhere near any of those during my time in school. As such, a little older (& hopefully wiser) I have been looking for alternative methods to hopefully make some headway in that ultimate ambition as an autodidact and this Ranieri-Roberts method seems promising. However, I wished to know if you would still recommend raw-dogging the paradigms first à la Ranieri-Dowling method? Though I have taken some AG in the past I’d still probably call myself a beginner, so please advise as though we are starting from 0. Thank you very much. Also really appreciate your content. Best
Hi there! That’s a great question. As I have proceeded in my studies of paedagogy, I have become convinced that input is really so very important, and reading is the best way to get it for Greek (though I do make the occasional podcast: ua-cam.com/video/Wc6enX_Wo5k/v-deo.htmlsi=AmrVxkOvxzYekpHg ). Learning grammar rules and focusing on translation tends to distract the mind; recently someone left a comment on my “Why traditional methods don’t work” video, and I’ll copy and paste it in its entirety since I think it’s quite brilliant: “The work put into vocab speeds up reading, because you automatically perceive the words. Grammar stops you 'reading' because you spend time identifying grammatical features and that is not what reading is. If someone says to you "if I were you" you can understand this without knowing it is using the subjunctive mood. Most hearers and users of the phrase don't know it is in the subjunctive, don't know what the subjunctive is and yet still (somehow, goodness only knows how) understand the phrase. Key thing is reading is a different category than conscious "parsing". One is slow, laborious and cognitively demanding. The other is at speed. The more grammar you juggle in your head the slower and slower and more laborious it will be. It will then become too difficult and you'll give up.” Ancient Greek happens to have a number of complex rules - so unless one is interested in translating into AG or composing in AG immediately, it is best not to think too much on any of these rules. Then, what about learning grammatical paradigms? This I think is up to the individual. I thrived learning the Latin paradigms by heart before reading Familia Romana. The AG ones were doable, but they are much more complex - much more complicated patterns to memorize. Still, it’s useful knowledge. But I dare say much more important is to acquire vocabulary, so that you can recognize the basic meaning of every word. One must learn what tenses are past, and a bit about aspect, but other than that it’s mostly about recognizing vocabulary. Thus memorizing some of the paradigms, especially “irregular” ones, is a great help. Was this helpful? If not, write another comment on this or another video and I’ll try to help offer some guidance.
I certainly agree that the degree of unrelatability of new vocabulary has an impact. When I started learning English in 5th grade, it seemed easy at first, until it became more advanced and all the new vocabulary was of French or Latin origin which was unrelatable to me back then. That was a small hurdle, and suddenly German seemed easier. However, in high school English suddenly helped me tremendously with French, and later with Latin. I experienced this again when I tried to read through a textbook of Finnish and all the vocabulary was again unrelatable. But I felt dopamine every time I could see a word of Swedish or even Proto-Norse origin, and I tried to latch on to those words. But even if the word is not a borrowing, I think that all vocabulary is easier to remember if you have the possibility of looking up the words' etymologies. Our learning styles differ, of course, but this works for me. Whenever you can embed the new words in some sort of story, they are easier to remember. It can be the word's linguistic history, or alternatively, it can be your personal story: If you think back to the situations where you learned the words (I often remember the place or setting where I learned a given word), then they often stick better in your brain.
I see you have an "Ancient Egyptian Phonology" book behind you! I'm learning a little Egyptian hieroglyphics myself and am interested in the restored pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian. Have you had a chance to read it, yet? If so, is it recommendable?
It is a decent book, though Allen disagrees with Peust - Stefano Vittori prefers Peust 1999, and I cannot offer a better piece of advice than to follow Stefano’s recommendation.
I wasn't really sure, but while he was explaining the comparative ease of learning different but similar alphabets, I noticed and read the shape behind him as the hieroglyph nb for gold and was already pretty proud of myself for that😂
The only solution to learn ancient Greek easier is to learn the roots and the orthography of the words that indicates the root in many cases, so that you recognise the words and eventually the phrases without thinking too much. Syntax and grammar are the easy stuff. Modern Greek is very helpful to that cause, because all the roots are there and also there are a lot of people to practice it. There is no other way for me, unless of course you are born in a family that speaks ancient Greek. The latter should be so rare lol
I'm surprised you don't mention the post-positive particles, and also the substantive use and sometimes pronominal use of articles.. those things really stumble my reading... but getting past that by trying to take in whole sentences at a time. I'm reading from JACT vol 1 and Athenaze vol 1.
I will sing my ancient Greek, like if singing to the song "Birds of a feather". It is poetic, and it is meant to be sung. It has natural beat, partitions, and delays. First I must select the correct era, and know what was sung at the time, what was popular.
Ironically enough you could think that this video is telling you to just learn Latin and you're going to have a much better time with it haha. Loved this more "rambling" type video.
Pharr has many flaws, but you can't fault him using the hook of the rage of Achilles for Homeric Greek. On French in Action, I immediately remembered MIreille.
30:00 You're right that the only way to develop a strong vocabulary is by reading, reading, reading, especially with Greek verbs, whose principal parts are so treacherous. You have to see διήνεγκα in context several times before your brain automatically "reads" διαφέρω into it. But Greek literature is so spread out and rarefied that I keep having the experience of seeing a word I recognize and thinking, "Oh yeah, I learned that word from Euripides, but it seems to have a slightly different meaning here. I better look it up..." And then I look up the word and LSJ cites it in exactly two places, once in Euripides, once in the text I'm reading but with a slightly different sense. It's like a "dis legomenon," I suppose, and I wonder why I put so much cognitive energy into a word when now I've encountered it in, like, the two places in extant Greek literature that I'm ever going to see it. My favorite author by far is Homer, but the hapax legomena are out of freaking control! Nowadays if I can reasonably guess what a Homeric word means, like "oh, it's probably some part of the ship" or "this must be a certain cut of meat," I don't bother looking it up. There have been too many times when I bustle off into Cunliffe only to find, "Nobody knows what this word means, but apparently it's a part of the ship." Thanks lol! This has not been my experience in Latin, except for some technical terms and obscure plant names in Vergil (I don't mean the Aeneid!). I think there's a lot more Latin literature from all eras for the lexicographers to work from, and so I get the feeling, while in the dictionary, that the word I'm looking up will help me in my future reading. AT LEAST most Greek words are made up of other, more common, Greek words and so at the advanced level you can grok a compound you've never seen before.
I long ago came to the conclusion that strong understanding of vocabulary is the single most important thing in language. If one has a deep and wide ranging knowledge of word meanings (even just in terms of passive recognition) then only a somewhat sketchy knowledge of the essential grammar will suffice to make texts highly transparent. This is something that native speakers of modern Italian or Spanish (for example) can benefit from if learning Latin - a high percentage of the vocabulary will be instantly recognisable to them. And if language is transparent then we can easily and pleasurably interact with it by extensively reading things which interest us. It is in this way that we deepen and reenforce language knowledge. But of course when it comes to something like Ancient Greek it's something of a conundrum to know how to build that body of vocabulary...
Ancient greek is the richest language and the MOST important. That s WHY almost every term in fields such as science,math, poetry are... Greek words. I haven't seen ANY sumerian or Sanskrit word 🤔 Unfortunately it s a language that cannot be taught by a foreigner and i m not saying this with a weird insinuation. But it s the reality.
I'm interested in learning both Latin and Ancient Greek. Would it be recommended to focus on one of them first, i.e. Latin, or do you think it's possible to learn both of them at the same time?
Thanks for this video, Luke! I agree about the Gospels and An Ephesian Tale being very easy... Afterwards, there is more choice. For example, I find Xenophon's Greek histories easy. I also wanted to ask you: Do you still use your FB account? I wrote to you a lot of time ago but I don't think you have read my message. Otherwise, how should I contact you? Thanks!
If someone knows what s an SOV language, ancient greek is also all the variations... It can be also VOS, SVO etc etc. This is what makes it complicated BUT simple at the same time ❤
How many times do you think rereading is helpful? When do diminishing returns kick in? When is it time to move to something else? Once you can read through the respective work fluently in the original? Thank you for this video, as for every one!
Hi Luke. What do you think of using Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana in the early and intermediate stages as part of the extensive reading plan? It contains parallel texts of conversations and (somewhat) graded original works.
Oh man, 26yrs ago, I took a Classical Greek seminar, 8 credit hrs. Was cruising along, seemed so easy, until they whipped out the final. It flushed the entire class down the toilet. Went from A- to C in the course ... and that was 8 credit hours worth of C. Three cnormal classes worth of C. That course alone dropped my degree from summa cum laude to merely cum laude LOL Obviously the professors (there were 2) expected a whole 'nother level of self-directed study. Unfortunately they hadn't built in any checks along the way, and we were lead down a primrose path. THe kicker on th efinal was that the profs put a passage at the end and said "if you can translate this with 90% accuracy you can skip the rest of the test and will receive an A for the course." I stared at it in uncomprehending horror .... it was all Greek to me! Har, har.
I'm currently learning Scottish Gaelic and I've dabbled with Old Irish, and it's the same situation. All the learning materials are SO focused on teaching grammar instead of basic vocabulary, -ō stems and -ā stems and copulas and yadda yadda and it's like, I just want to read about Étaín getting turned into a moth and blown around Ireland by Midir's jealous wife.
@52:16, @polýMATHY, What you are describing regarding playing the role of a teacher sounds rather like the models for question and answer presented by Rouse in his "The Teaching of Greek at the Perse School, Cambridge" report for his Department of Education. Have you read it? It's fabulous.
You must go from language learning to language creating . After having ste general structure of languages down then learning a partucular one is much much easier.
First, we are learning the written language, which is usually more complex than the spoken one (save the various dialects like Italian or German ;-) and aimed at well-educated people. Conversely, _Koinè_ or _New Testament_ Greek are far easier. Second, all languages have some breaking point, before which learning is difficult. Once you've passed that point, everything becomes easier.
44:02 Oh my God, Callirhoe from the class in the last semester of grad school has come back to haunt me. Actually, if Ethiopica got mentioned, then I’d be haunted.
I think it was just hard. I wasn’t disciplined enough for the workload of this Greek Novel class & so I’d read as much of the English of the chapter as possible (which was part of the assignment), speed read the Greek (translate but with enough understanding to retranslate in class, since reading from a prepared translation was rightfully discouraged), & I usually ignored the accompanying articles. They were interesting, but secondary scholarship told me I wasn’t meant for academia. But I certainly want to go back to some of the novels someday.
Please explain to the phobic ones that the tenses of irregular verbs are simply formed by different verbs which are fascinating because they give so many derivatives. Take the verb λέγω. In the past the type ειπον is used which relates to έπος. In the past perfect the type ειρηκα is used, related to the future ερεω or ειρεω related to ρητός (explicit), ρήτωρ (orator), ρησις (dictum) etc!
ONE tip for someone who wants to learn Greek in general,not the ancient one: JUST listen to the numbers sounds from 1-10. Then memorise them and TRY to connect the sounds to the letters❤ Do this and THEN continue to grammar bla bla. Of course the letters might be hard because they aren't Latin but gradually you ll get used to it.
Salve Luci! I would appreciate your opinion about the Assimil course for (Attic) Ancient Greek (Le Grec Ancien) including it‘s pronunciation on the audio material. I could‘nt find written macrons in it BUT every text/word is pronounced clearly on the audio material, so I wanted to ask if it‘s possible to know every vocal length only by hearing the audio without seeing written macrons?
Hi there, I know the Assmil Ancient Greek course quite well. The text’s simple dialogues and easy are quite nice, but the presentation is atrocious and confusing. I learned a number of useful things from reading it, since the main text is composed well. So it’s not useless. But if you don’t know French you may not have a lot to help you. The audio is one of the worst pronounced Ancient Greek I’ve heard in my life. I believe one of the vocal artists is attempting to use an Attic pronunciation but has no clue how to do that at the most fundamental level. Thus I do not recommend the audio.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thank you Luke! I did'nt expect that the audios are so bad :( I bought the course because I want to learn Ancient Greek in Attic pronounciation and need something for beginners before starting with Athenaze... I found your Attic readings for Athenaze but your Ancient Greek in Action is in Lucian pronounciation... Is there anything you can recommend?
I always feel like an outsider in languages communities. Orthography, vocabulary, and pronunciation all come to me very, very easily. It’s the grammar that is the absolute bane of my existence. Arabic, Russian, Latin, Greek, Polish, Hebrew, Chinese; it’s the grammar that I can hardly grasp without referencing my cheat sheets.
Hunch (since I haven't even completed a first year Greek grammar): Could it be that the authors of so many Greek textbooks don't expose students to some aspects of the grammar, because they are 1. teaching to the exams, 2. are keeping it "short" since they don't expect many students to continue reading Greek anyway?
9:30 Yeah, it's one of those funny grammar quirks that most languages in Europe do, but for some reason English doesn't. Certainly true for all Slavic, all Romance, and German.
In Germany, the students are expected to study only Attic, but then the Abitur is all about Homer, to the point that the written exam often has a question on either explaining the difference between the Homeric form and Attic, or providing the Attic form for a Homeric form. (A few years ago, we also had to read the Pre-Socratics, but I've never seen an Attic text as a required text for the German students.)
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Why exactly is it so hard to learn Ancient Greek? While learning Latin poses no small challenge, those who have learned the first language of the Romans often find the Hellenic tongue to be strikingly difficult by comparison, for reasons never quite clear. In this video, I summarize all the greatest challenges and pitfalls of studying Ancient Greek, I explain why Ancient Greek is much harder to learn than Latin for the majority of people, much more than they expect, at least, and most importantly I tell you how you can remedy these problems and become a fluent reader of Ancient Greek, once and for all.
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Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart, conducted by Neville Mariner
00:00 Intro
1:10 Alphabet & diacritics
4:32 Morphology, stem changes, augments
10:08 Heterogeneity of the target literature
13:12 The Textbooks & Readers
18:19 The BIGGEST Problem is...
25:09 How to solve the problem
30:20 You’re not gonna like this
41:16 Why the Ranieri-Roberts Approach is so effective
46:53 The most important thing I should tell you
48:35 HOW to read
54:57 How to begin reading real Ancient Greek literature
58:29 Bilingual texts are NOT cheating
1:10 Tentative Reading Plan
#ancientgreek #greek #ancientgreece
So, which language is harder than ancient Greek in your opinion? Sanskrit? Chinese? Japanese? Finnish? Arabic? Hebrew?
@@Seventh7Artnone of them
Dude i really appreciate your efforts BUT... Your accent and your pronunciation are very bad... You cannot analyse a language like that. For example the EFYGON it s not epewgon😂 You pronounced it this way... It s E-feeghon,the correct way. I understand i m not expecting from you to talk like Socrates BUT indirectly you re mispronouncing also modern greek.
@@EmpireOfLEMBERG
You shouldn't be correcting someone, if you don't have the knowledge yourself: His pronunciation as an emphatic P is the historic attic pronunciation, it only became a fricative F in the later Koine period. So no buddy, his pronunciation is exactly correct.
The υ is only pronounced as ee (as in "bee") in the later koine to byzantine period, certainly not in attic pronunciation, before that it was pronounced as the french u in "tu" or as the german ü in "Tüte".
Luke has multiple videos on his channel with a wide variety of pronunciations - he has videos in attic, in koine, in byzantine and even in modern greek pronunciation.
Not going to stop me from learning it to fluency, no matter how long it may take.
Why?
@@zinknot why not
@@zinknot Because I love it that much. That's why.
It amazes me how many extremely helpful videos about learning Ancient Greek you've released in just ONE year: detailed 2.5-hour Lucian pronunciation guide, Ranieri-Roberts guide for autodidacts, macronizing guide, Iliad recitation guide+Kephalos challenge, and now this video! And this year isn't even over yet! You have single-handedly eliminated the excuse that there are no accessible entry-level materials about Ancient Greek on the web. You are truly a gift to humanity, Luke!
whtas do you say..????.ALL GREECE KNOW THAT ATHENS SPOKEN ALBANIAN TILL 1930.................ALSO TODAY IN GREECE SPEAK MAJORITIES IN ALBANIAN...............................THE MITOLOGY IN GREECE SPEAK ONLY ALBANIAN..!!!...ua-cam.com/video/hmZjeU599MQ/v-deo.html&pp=ygUbbWl0b2xvZ3kgYWxiYW5pYW4gaW4gZ3JlZWNl
I will say that reading the book of Revelation in the Bible was the single most gripping experience I've ever had reading Greek. I got to chapter 8 and literally couldn't put it down. It's so vivid and there are so many intriguing things happening in quick succession if you can get past some of the mild disconnected-ness of it.
Great recommendation!
0:07 I also had this question when I first started learning this language, you’re not alone.
I’m pretty much dead set on learning ancient Greek. I’ve got three years of college Japanese, so you can’t scare me off. ❤
whtas do you say..????.ALL GREECE KNOW THAT ATHENS SPOKEN ALBANIAN TILL 1930.................ALSO TODAY IN GREECE SPEAK MAJORITIES IN ALBANIAN...............................THE MITOLOGY IN GREECE SPEAK ONLY ALBANIAN..!!!...ua-cam.com/video/hmZjeU599MQ/v-deo.html&pp=ygUbbWl0b2xvZ3kgYWxiYW5pYW4gaW4gZ3JlZWNl
i finally saw mozart's magic flute live yesterday, was not expecting to recognise the first piece! brilliant choice for intro music you chose.
Oh that’s great! I hope you enjoyed the opera! One of my favorite pieces by Mozart.
@@polyMATHY_Luke optima erat!
mi lukin e sitelen lawa sina
@@jr.jackrabbit10 tenpo ni la sina sona e ni: mi jan pi toki pona :)
sina lukin sama mi a!
hi, luke!! just wanted to let you know i have beaten cancer and even rung the bell!! the last video i watched before the ceremony was the gladiator ii video
@@SoulcatcherLucario Praise God!
I literally have never seen you before but this is amazing news
Hell yeah that's crazy impressive
That's fantastic, congratulations!
I was lucky growing up with German and English, and learning French and Italian at school. Later on, I also learnt Russian. When I needed to do a year of Latin, I found it surprisingly easy, with a lot if vocabulary from French and Italian, and a lot of grammar from German and especially Russian.
Exactly! If only it were so easy to go into AG. MG is helpful, like I said, if you get to C1.
It works the other way, too. I learned Latin first, and it made Polish grammar easier to understand.
Croatian grammar is 90% latin. Proto latin is very slavic
Why is Latin so hard? I speak like 7 modern languages, many of which are more difficult than Latin, yet I still struggle a lot with this ancient tongue. Why is Latin so hard? I think it comes down to something similar; dead languages are much more inconvenient to learn. If there were lots of dubs in Latin, lots of easy, but compelling works of fiction (which there are not past the beginning to early intermediate stages!), lots of people to practice with, I am sure it would be a lot easier.
Latin is easy in comparison of Ancient Greek ;-)
I actually think Latin is quite easy in some ways (until you start learning all the verb conjugations lol), do you mind if I ask you what languages you speak and which one is your mother tongue?
@@jorgitoislamico4224 My native language is Danish, and I speak the following languages (in order of proficiency): English, German, Russian, French, Spanish, Swedish and a little Mandarin Chinese.
@@SouthPark333Gaming Well Danish is quite different from Latin so no wonder why it was harder for you, my native language is Spanish so I found Latin to be slightly easier to learn that let's say German for example (I'm still learning both tho) but considerably harder than Portuguese or Italian.
@@jorgitoislamico4224 I am conversationally fluent in almost all the other language I just listed and know the grammar very well. I do not find Latin difficult; I find it more inconvenient and therefore harder than most modern languages.
I can really recommend the "Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine" written by Constantinus Tischendorf from 1842. It's a side-by-side Greek and Latin version of the new testament. If you can already read Latin well, you can use the Latin to understand the Greek. The Latin translation is so literal that it is extremely useful. I am now reading Mark after (almost) fimishing volume 1 of Athenaze. There are some things that confuse me in the Greek, but most is understood and it is a very nice break from Athenaze
Where did you find it? Now I wanna check it out!
@@Roma_eterna For me, it is the second google entry if I search with "Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine Tischendorf" (the first one too, but that one includes handwritten notes)
I don't know where I got it from. It sat on my PC for years before I finally decided to use it :)
Luke, you may have a new beginner Greek student here. I studied classical Greek some ‘centuries’ ago from a prof as old as Euripides who took on the beginner classes because the TAs would show off and give students a hard time. So, he lead us through the declensions like taking a bath. He used a text from some primary school in bygone years with brief texts. Brief exercises. Brief chapters that limited new info to one grammatical item in the chapter instead of say 10 in modern textbooks with 20 page chapters. My happiest class at college. I may be willing to restart.
This is a helpful speech for learning almost any topic
Great video dear Luke. Your passion is inspiring
Thanks!
Thank you for putting together the list of readings, amazing work.
17:03 smoothest transition ever, even without the drums!
No one could, with a straight face, call me good at Latin and while I am proud to say I can understand John Charity Spring for the most part, Minecraftium is definitely my high watermark, but even with all that said, boy do I feel inadequate after watching your videos. You're an inspiration, Luke!
Ah, well, who knows, one day, I may even finish il metodo natura. :)
Super useful. Thanks, Luke!
The biggest lie/scam that we're told is that bilingual texts are cheating when we know that the ancients themselves used such materials in their own second-language acquisition. Indeed, one of my greatest resources has been my Latin-Greek New Testament; the claim that the Evangelists are an excellent first step in a Greek reading plan is 100% true in my personal experience.
I have become convinced of the same! In Second Language Acquisition theory, it is definitely well established that it is better to stay in the target language whenever possible, especially when explaining grammar, and certainly when conveying meaning. Thus we must use bilingual texts effectively: learn the meaning of whatever passage, then read the target language original; understand everything about it. Then see if, upon reading it solely in the original, you can understand it all.
Similarly, if we use Familia Romana or another Latin-only reader, we need to eventually be able to read the text without looking at any of the notes or pictures for meaning. That is what builds confidence and competence.
Since any of the Greek “PER SE ILLUSTRATA” readers are mediocre to terrible, they are almost useless, robbing us of confidence as often as they seem to give it. I’m quite disillusioned with them having completed that grand spreadsheet.
It seems there are many paths up Mount Parnassus.
2:37-2:41 Really looking forward to those as well as to more videos about evidence for the pronunciation of the other diphthongs you haven't covered yet!
I was learning using an online course for Ancient Greek called Lingua GRAECA Per Se Illustrata and I found myself in this exact same place 😭 I didn't know if I found it so much more difficult to learn than Latin because I wasn't smart enough, because the language was just harder or because the course was just not good enough for me, I'm glad you decided to finally answer my question lol good video as always
Because we use a different alphabet... Our letters d probably make it hard for you
However in all honesty... Ancient greek is the hardest language. I m not saying it from the aspect of patriotism but it s the hardest one💯💯 NOT even greeks can speak it...
@@EmpireOfLEMBERG Oh no I had already studied the alphabet before and I can read it pretty much as easily as the Latin alphabet, it was the grammar that was hard
Also, why do you have a menorah if you're Greek? I thought Greeks were Christian.
@@jorgitoislamico4224 maybe he is a Greek jew, bro use your mind.
@@lushu3943 Well, I don't think Greek and Jewish Greek are the same, Greek Jews are Jews living in Greece, and Greeks are the descendants of Ancient Greeks
Ahhh, observing your video I now understand why "the view" in Modern Greek is «η θέα». Thank you 🧿
Ah indeed!
@@polyMATHY_Luke And you are so very right about this state of disconnect that Anglophones will have with Greek, ancient or modern. When I was growing up my Mum took me from New Zealand to Paris where she worked as a personal secretary for one of the Secretaries General of the OECD. One day I went in to meet her for lunch and we were traversing through one of the tunnels under the chateau there and we came across some of the ladies of the Greek delegation whom she had obviously met before this. Mum was always very proud to present me to any Greek, but I think should have been more proud of the perfect immaculate Greek that she mastered learning off my Greek Father. I could see that these ladies held her in esteem for her use of their language as not many non-Greeks learn Greek nowadays, especially Anglos, and especially ones from NZ. But for me watching on, this was "all Greek" to me. I felt this disconnexion to it that I didn't get with the ease I had learning French there, or, like you, German at school. Because there were no free lunches it turns out. Well, these last three years I have been learning Greek at the local Orthodox church here in Auckland. I can now read Greek with ease and learn many new words on a quotidian basis. You say "read, read and then read". I do this and I also learn Greek songs on YT and sing along to them. And now, for me, I get these free lunches with Greek, and with that example with η θέα these are small ways of broaching this large disconnect between us speaking English and learning the Greek tongue. So, thanks again (and sorry about the the wall of text, but you inspired me here).🙏🏽
Great video so far Luke. I'm about 25 minutes in and it's all so interesting. Again thank you for the inspiration and the expertise you bring.
I tried to learn ancient Greek and got stuck on lesson 3 or 4 of The Great Course ciriculum. It was the case system, it was hard to comprehend. Then I noticed the same teacher also taught Latin! So I began Latin to take a break from Greek's case system... ... *sigh*... In this moment I realized there was no escape 😢. But the case system was much easier to learn using a English alphabet! Currently im in chapter 19 of LLPSI and I love all of your videos.
I love the Ancient Greek declination cup at 20:32.
I'm a greek native speaker and sometimes I was so frustrated in my Ancient-Greek learning course comparing the progress I made reading through Oerberg's books about Latin. I used to start from early Greek authors who were writing in Kathareuousa going back all the way to Greek-Koine. I felt that there was a huge gap between those two, maybe because Kathareuousa in my eyes was seen as something "man-made/fictional". Watching your approach I know that patience is the key and if I want a more complete approach I should start your method through the excel file I had obtained in another video. Also there is a useful Latin-Greek-French parallel reader that may be useful. Thanks for the amount of time you spent giving us advices about the matter Luke!
I found your channel through metatron. 10:06 Made me feel so much better as just a mom learning Koine Greek to read the new testament. Learning alone. So much fun, but very confusing at first.....still. I'll pick it up though. I'm using biblioliguo and videos like this.
Thank you Luke for another great video! I'm also learning ancient greek with help of ,,alexandros" , athenaze or lingua graeca per se illustrata :) Thanks for good adivises!!
What makes a language hard to learn is not the complexity of the grammar, but its irregularity. That's why Turkish is so much easier to learn than Greek - its grammar is far more complex, but it is almost perfectly regular.
You compared the richest language to s Mongolic one...
@@HaSatanhagiahow ignorant...
Man Korean has so many weird pronunciation rules and exceptions from the one year I took, I think it's mostly regulated but definitely some exceptions. I actually found French way easier once I learned a lot of the rules for phonetics because there's a lot but they're super consistent. The grammar not quite as much.
Learning both Greek and Italian at the same time, and I even being beginner to intermediate, I can't even IMAGINE attempting Ancient Greek OR Latin, thank you for your beautifully passionate videos, from us - as passionate - language learners! 😌
Έμαθες τίποτα καινούργιο;;
I'm delighted that you're using the attic dialect.
As a modern Greek speaker, I find koine Greek much, much easier to learn and understand than classical or Homeric Greek.
As a modern Greek learner, I found his pronunciation confusing to say the least.
Like I recognise the letters, and some of the components are familiar. So I would have read αποφευγην as apofevgyn, not apopeogyn.
I've always found Greek eu = ev to English (and in my own Dutch) eu like in Europe to be easy enough to understand as a simple transposition of letters that would look very similar when chiseled in stone. Eu being eo, not so much.
Did pronunciation really change that much?
@@CitizenMio this is a big debate. Some scholars think it has, some think it hasn’t.
In the video, the Erasmian pronunciation is used, which again is debatable. If you ask me, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
You have to understand that there was no unified Ancient Greek language, but various dialects. In some, the use of the aspirated “h” was already in decline. Others had already done away with the use of the “w” sound in front of certain words. Many of these changes toward the modern Greek pronunciation were already happening since ancient times, so, who knows exactly how Ancient Greek was pronounced, when first and foremost, there was no such thing as a unified Ancient Greek language that kids learned in school.
Today, those who wish to learn Ancient Greek, a standard reconstructed pronunciation has been developed for the sake of standardization, especially for non-modern Greek speakers. In Greece, only the modern Greek pronunciation is used to render Ancient Greek.
In my opinion from what I have read, I believe that there were definitely differences in pronunciation between ancient and modern Greek, but the shift to the modern Greek pronunciation was already happening since the classical times. So, having said all that, I don’t think that the differences were so stark such as the reconstructed pronunciation used in this video, which sounds very foreign to modern Greek ears. It sounds like a German trying to speak Greek. If anything, if someone wants to have an understanding of the pronunciation of Ancient Greek, they should use modern Greek as a reference, not some random reconstructed version of it. Someone may argue that languages and pronunciations change through time, and I agree, but you have to understand that Greek as a language is VERY conservative.
The fact that without training, a modern Greek can understand 80% of a Koine Greek sentence, two forms of the Greek language removed by a span of 2000 years, speaks volumes!
@@jimatreidēsIn any case, using modern pronunciations for ancient texts of the same language is very common. In Spanish, for example, we read everything according to each one's accent and no one really uses the pronunciation of 16th century to read the more classic literature of our language. I think the best thing is to look for optimal conventions, especially on the part of current Greeks, for very anachronistic whether to use one pronunciation or another, at least we shall not "waste the time" with these debates, which confuse, above all, many new learners
@@Mazorca-qq3li I would choose one pronunciation and stick with it.
Because you're speaking it without understanding what the root of the words reference.
1:45 Funny; I learned the (Russian) Cyrillic alphabet, in about half an hour. Yet, in Greek alphabet, I’m still hot-dog water, after years. I guess, because I’ve never officially studied Greek, in a classroom. 😅
You’ve inspired me once again to get back into it! I’ve been doing a lot of Sanskrit studying the past few years, and sometimes I get discouraged by that, like will I ever be able to just read??? But then I get back into Latin and Greek and it feels like there’s just so much more material to help with reading fluency. This was a great outline of a reading plan, very helpful.
Grazie, Luke! Una volta finito con i miei studi, riprenderò il greco antico. Le recensioni di libri che fai sono fantastiche, e comprerò sicuramente ὁ Φάρος e cercherò di imparare un po' ogni giorno. Es gibt so viele Dinge, die ich lernen will, aber wie es aussieht, muss ich mir einen Plan erstellen und hoffen, dass alles klappt. 😆 ευχαριστώ, διδάσκαλε.
For me, the hardest part of ancient Greek has always been the unrelatability of the vocab. As a native Dutch speaker growing up with English, a lot of Romance vocabulary was familiar from the start, making Latin much more accessible.
Dat is echt
He nailed the problems, lack of cognates and lack of lots of reading material. I learned Greek via Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek. He takes you through Book I of the Iliad. After that it took me years to get through the rest of the Iliad and the Odyssey, using Cunliffe's Lexicon of the Homeric dialect. Painfully slow, but it was more interesting to read great epic poetry painfully slowly than to zip through page after page of paradigmatic sentences. Latin at least has a bunch of fun translations of modern novels into Latin on which you can work up reading fluency - Pride and Prejudice, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, The Hobbit, Harry Potter, etc. For Greek, there's slim pickings (Harry Potter in Attic). And in a modern language like portuguese you can just work up speed and fluency by reading fun modern novels (e.g. Jorge Amado) one after the other.
I have just started re-learning Ancient Greek for my Byzantine Studies. This video is like it was made for me especially 😂
Your videos amazing ❤️
Thank you, Luke. The moment I started typing this, I realized I have way too much to say to put in a YT comment. Anyways, I was encouraged by this video and accidentally watched the entire thing. I have been climbing the Greek mountain for a while with pretty dismal progress (in my estimation). Spanish was so much easier.
Don't forget Euclid! He wrote early Koine; the dual is conspicuously absent (δυσιν ορθιαις ισαι εισιν instead of δυοιν ορθιαιν whatever the verb would be). I'm a mathematician.
I had a Teach Yourself book in which Element 1:15 (Εαν δυο ευθειαι τεμνωσιν αλληλας...) and the part of Anabasis where a Rhodian suggests catching 2000 animals and making mollags to cross the river were passages.
_Thank you_ for this. I am glad i watched through it and now feel more encouraged to try again. In the description text, the tentative reading plan should probably be at 1:01:10, not 1:10.
25:08 I’ve felt the same way. Recently I’ve even wanted to find some way to get a list of cognates. I remember Keller & Russel giving cognates in English to Greek words that did not seem similar at all but it was cool to see nevertheless & even that helps me personally.
Any technique that works, is valuable. For me, I think the solution is to encounter the text in entertaining narratives. That way you remember the word from context.
I feel that almost every Greek word has some cognate somewhere.
What are the most surprising cognates? I don't have a most surprising cognate, but here are some cognates:
φρέαρ - burn (in names like Washburn, maybe also fire burn but that's not certain)
ομίχλη - мгла (the initial ο represents a laryngeal lost in Russian)
μισθός - meed (reward).
χάριν σοι οἶδα : The theme is so close to my heart. My major complain to academia has been : "why the heck not to create so many textbooks, with gradually increasing complexity which would let us eventually much less painfully attack something like Phado. But this is possible in an ideal world. I think, with the absence of my dreamy eventualities, your advice may be very good. I will really try to get through Steadman's edition of Symposium without relying on gloss.. I did that with Shakespeare ones. Also I want to reread John similarly..
Koine Greek (Ben Kantor’s channel) has koine Greek videos for the Gospels of Matthew and Mark which help with understanding for newer readers
I hit a barrier with Latin. But at the same time found I was fine with the Vulgate Bible. So I read in the Vulgate with ease.
Now, obviously, Vulgate Latin differs in some respects to Classical Latin. But there's a massive overlap of both grammar and vocab (but obviously differences as well).
When I started out I couldn't read the Vulgate Bible. Now I can.
My conjecture is this. If you become competent and fluent reading the Vulgate Bible it will be eadier to approach other forms. Because the content is a stepping stone.
So my adapted conjecture applies the same to Greek. This approach starts out from Koine Greek and the Bible. Other people might have different starting point. But the principle is the same.
My conjecture here is that if you're an accomplished Koine reader you will do reasonably well in other Ancient Greek but you'll need sone adaptation, but you won't be starting from scratch.
Boiling down the conjecture. You do well to read a lot of stuff that is accessible to you.
Btw. I am a big fan of the idea of adaptation of original works. Sad it's not done much. This for every language including one's own! Adaptation should be done a lot more to my mind.
Final point. Rereading is for me a religion. Things don't come on first pass.
Take away. You need to become a reader. You need to fluent at reading something. Totally agree.
John is a lot easier than Luke, btw. Might be a good progression. While on Luke, worth thinking sbout Acts of the Apostles. Same author as Luke (I think), part faith, part mythology, part historical novel. Higher literary style.
You should interview Stanford historian Victor Davis Hanson about this and other topics regarding ancient Greece and Rome. It would be such a fascinating interview!
Since i speak sanskrit too.
i found it alot easier if i adopted the sanskrti method to study greek where i started from root and aorist first.
(I can elaborate) like using the process of gunation in greek since its really similar for us
like bhuž is root it comes bhauž / bhāuž. where bhauž became bhoj and bhāuž bhauj
The solution to most language learning problems - consume more content!
Indeed! And the best and most consistent input we can get are simply the texts themselves.
Just about sums up what I've concluded about learning a new language. Pronunciation can usually be summed with a short article, and after that it becomes a matter of practice. Grammar can be trickier, because you can always find some weird quirk you might not expect (why can I be _in_ my house, but _at_ my home?), but at the end of the day even the most complex system is learnable. The biggest obstacle, however, is just the sheer size of vocabulary you have to acquire, remember, and recall in a second to be in any way functioning in a language. Pronunciation and grammar are mostly finite processes, but acquiring vocabulary is a struggle with no end in sight, to some extent even with your native language.
Interlinear is the best I can do in any foreign language, because it cuts the non-vocabulary complexity. I'm sure I could get to a "foreign only" level, but that would just take more hours than I am willing to commit. Also, a word of encouragement, composing simple sentences in your new language is great too.
Great viceo as usual, Thank you. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on From Alpha to Omega by Anne Groton?
I have tried reading ancient Greek: Iliad, Plato, Elements.
Did it not go as you liked? Could the advice I provide here be of help?
3:25 The illegibility of the readings get worse in some modern typefaces designed for Modern Greek, with polytonic an afterthought. There for legibility of the modern script the relative x-height is typically large, meaning that the diacritics are further minimized. Some sans serif faces adopt square quotes like those found in Helvetica's commas, further reducing the part that distinguishes the breathings to a diminutive tail! This is not a problem for modern greek, but a serious issue indeed for polytonic!
One additional thing is that I observe that the diacritics in Byzantine texts are usually large and ample, so this is quite something introduced in the evolution of writing technology to metal typesetting.
Very good point! Some of the free fonts on the GFS (Greek Font Society) are nice for this.
Thank you! I got along better after I conceded that acquiring Greek is was just going to take twice as long as acquiring Latin, no matter what methods I used. I glanced at an interesting study recently -- can't for the life of me remember where I saw it -- that suggested that the cognitive drag of using an unfamiliar alphabet remains a factor for much longer than you're aware of it being a factor: a new alphabet slows down your reading even months after you have supposedly mastered it. -- But I think you're right, it's the paucity of cognates that's the real killer.
your vedeos are amazing.
I have learned (putonghua-mandarin) Chinese to a b2 level but Ancient Greek and koine Greek which I’ve studied for years I can’t even understand a word just sounding out words is difficult
Today after the service I sat next to the preacher and read Acts 27:9,10 in Greek, then handed him the book. He read it with somewhat less fluency and a more archaic pronunciation. I picked that passage because today is the Fast and everyone in the room recently experienced a hurricane (but the one mentioned in that chapter occurred after the Fast).
FIRST I LOVE YOUR VIDEOS BRO
As someone who was raised bilingual (English and Spanish), I can say when I started to actually try to learn Italian, modern Greek, ancient Greek, and Latin it sounded very familiar to me, and the pronunciations came naturally at least for Italian, modern Greek, and Latin (Classical Greek much harder for me though lol), I can also say this for Arabic as a Spanish speaker, it was influenced by Arabic for almost 1,000 years in Spain.
Just give it a try folks, it's not that scary to fail and sound dumb, sometimes it's funny and you make good friends.
Unfortunately we don't know the original pronunciation of that greek Language... Everything s just speculations. However we just speak them based on the modern greek accent and more precisely on the accent of Athens.
The influence of Arabic on Spanish won't make Arabic any easier. Their influence on Spanish is limited to some vocabulary, nothing else.
I have joked for decades that all languages are equally hard because the difficulty of learning vocabulary is so much greater than all the other difficulties. Indeed, I think that the real advantage of Esperanto is not the simplified grammar but the agglutinative word-building tools. Not only does it mean that learning a fewer number of roots helps you parse so much vocabulary, it also makes it easier to periphrastically construct words that'll be understood when you don't know the "proper" term. So, yeah, I agree that more cognates with your native language is a huge part of how hard a language will be for you to learn.
If English did not have a large Latin vocabulary, and so a student had to learn equal amounts of vocabulary for either language, I actually think Greek would be easier than Latin because the syntax can more closely match that of English. Verbs don't by default go at ends of sentences. Participial constructions are more diverse like that of English. Articles are super helpful. Sentences are broken up with enclitics and conjunctions more frequently, and one doesn't find sentences running as long in Greek through (over)use of relative pronouns.
I agree! That seems to be the case.
Hello Luke
[I don’t suppose you’ll see this as this video is old but worth a try anyway]
I tried learning AG some years ago, technically it was two semesters as part of my history degree, and it was a complete bust. My instructor employed the grammar-translation method (Luschnig specifically 😅) and honestly I didn’t retain much post my exams, and certainly couldn’t read anything of substance. I mourn this because I have always loved the dramas and wanted to read them in the original AG but we got nowhere near any of those during my time in school. As such, a little older (& hopefully wiser) I have been looking for alternative methods to hopefully make some headway in that ultimate ambition as an autodidact and this Ranieri-Roberts method seems promising.
However, I wished to know if you would still recommend raw-dogging the paradigms first à la Ranieri-Dowling method?
Though I have taken some AG in the past I’d still probably call myself a beginner, so please advise as though we are starting from 0.
Thank you very much.
Also really appreciate your content.
Best
Hi there! That’s a great question. As I have proceeded in my studies of paedagogy, I have become convinced that input is really so very important, and reading is the best way to get it for Greek (though I do make the occasional podcast: ua-cam.com/video/Wc6enX_Wo5k/v-deo.htmlsi=AmrVxkOvxzYekpHg ).
Learning grammar rules and focusing on translation tends to distract the mind; recently someone left a comment on my “Why traditional methods don’t work” video, and I’ll copy and paste it in its entirety since I think it’s quite brilliant:
“The work put into vocab speeds up reading, because you automatically perceive the words.
Grammar stops you 'reading' because you spend time identifying grammatical features and that is not what reading is.
If someone says to you "if I were you" you can understand this without knowing it is using the subjunctive mood. Most hearers and users of the phrase don't know it is in the subjunctive, don't know what the subjunctive is and yet still (somehow, goodness only knows how) understand the phrase.
Key thing is reading is a different category than conscious "parsing". One is slow, laborious and cognitively demanding. The other is at speed. The more grammar you juggle in your head the slower and slower and more laborious it will be. It will then become too difficult and you'll give up.”
Ancient Greek happens to have a number of complex rules - so unless one is interested in translating into AG or composing in AG immediately, it is best not to think too much on any of these rules.
Then, what about learning grammatical paradigms? This I think is up to the individual. I thrived learning the Latin paradigms by heart before reading Familia Romana. The AG ones were doable, but they are much more complex - much more complicated patterns to memorize. Still, it’s useful knowledge. But I dare say much more important is to acquire vocabulary, so that you can recognize the basic meaning of every word. One must learn what tenses are past, and a bit about aspect, but other than that it’s mostly about recognizing vocabulary. Thus memorizing some of the paradigms, especially “irregular” ones, is a great help.
Was this helpful? If not, write another comment on this or another video and I’ll try to help offer some guidance.
I certainly agree that the degree of unrelatability of new vocabulary has an impact. When I started learning English in 5th grade, it seemed easy at first, until it became more advanced and all the new vocabulary was of French or Latin origin which was unrelatable to me back then. That was a small hurdle, and suddenly German seemed easier. However, in high school English suddenly helped me tremendously with French, and later with Latin.
I experienced this again when I tried to read through a textbook of Finnish and all the vocabulary was again unrelatable. But I felt dopamine every time I could see a word of Swedish or even Proto-Norse origin, and I tried to latch on to those words.
But even if the word is not a borrowing, I think that all vocabulary is easier to remember if you have the possibility of looking up the words' etymologies. Our learning styles differ, of course, but this works for me. Whenever you can embed the new words in some sort of story, they are easier to remember. It can be the word's linguistic history, or alternatively, it can be your personal story: If you think back to the situations where you learned the words (I often remember the place or setting where I learned a given word), then they often stick better in your brain.
I see you have an "Ancient Egyptian Phonology" book behind you! I'm learning a little Egyptian hieroglyphics myself and am interested in the restored pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian. Have you had a chance to read it, yet? If so, is it recommendable?
It is a decent book, though Allen disagrees with Peust - Stefano Vittori prefers Peust 1999, and I cannot offer a better piece of advice than to follow Stefano’s recommendation.
I wasn't really sure, but while he was explaining the comparative ease of learning different but similar alphabets, I noticed and read the shape behind him as the hieroglyph nb for gold and was already pretty proud of myself for that😂
When is your textbook on ancient Greek being released? Something like LLPSI for Greek would be great
The textbook that I am currently helping in developing (I am not the author) is superior to LLPSI.
What's the name of this textbook or any information about it?
Thanks!
Grātiās, Jāsōn!
Just started Ancient Greek in University. Nice points, Luke! I wonder how the Romans (e.g., Cicero) did it.
They went to Athens and learned from Athenian rhetors. It’s much easier to learn a language when you can get that kind of input and practice.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I was Athens just summer. Too bad I couldn't find many of those!
@@NoferTadrosthey are long gone sadly but that's modern Greece for ya!
🤣 sorry but ancient greek cannot be taught by a non greek guy. First of all the accent... If your teacher speak it as the dude here... Good luck 🤣🤣🤣
Let me guess, you also dont like katharevousa?
What are those nice modular cubbyhole bookshelves?
They’re nice, aren’t they? My parents got them for me when I was in high school; I’ve had them ever since.
Ancient Greek is just happy to see you.
Will you offer Biblical Aramaic in the future at the Ancient Language Institute?
The only solution to learn ancient Greek easier is to learn the roots and the orthography of the words that indicates the root in many cases, so that you recognise the words and eventually the phrases without thinking too much. Syntax and grammar are the easy stuff. Modern Greek is very helpful to that cause, because all the roots are there and also there are a lot of people to practice it. There is no other way for me, unless of course you are born in a family that speaks ancient Greek. The latter should be so rare lol
I'm surprised you don't mention the post-positive particles, and also the substantive use and sometimes pronominal use of articles.. those things really stumble my reading... but getting past that by trying to take in whole sentences at a time. I'm reading from JACT vol 1 and Athenaze vol 1.
I will sing my ancient Greek, like if singing to the song "Birds of a feather". It is poetic, and it is meant to be sung. It has natural beat, partitions, and delays. First I must select the correct era, and know what was sung at the time, what was popular.
Ironically enough you could think that this video is telling you to just learn Latin and you're going to have a much better time with it haha.
Loved this more "rambling" type video.
Pharr has many flaws, but you can't fault him using the hook of the rage of Achilles for Homeric Greek.
On French in Action, I immediately remembered MIreille.
30:00 You're right that the only way to develop a strong vocabulary is by reading, reading, reading, especially with Greek verbs, whose principal parts are so treacherous. You have to see διήνεγκα in context several times before your brain automatically "reads" διαφέρω into it. But Greek literature is so spread out and rarefied that I keep having the experience of seeing a word I recognize and thinking, "Oh yeah, I learned that word from Euripides, but it seems to have a slightly different meaning here. I better look it up..." And then I look up the word and LSJ cites it in exactly two places, once in Euripides, once in the text I'm reading but with a slightly different sense. It's like a "dis legomenon," I suppose, and I wonder why I put so much cognitive energy into a word when now I've encountered it in, like, the two places in extant Greek literature that I'm ever going to see it. My favorite author by far is Homer, but the hapax legomena are out of freaking control! Nowadays if I can reasonably guess what a Homeric word means, like "oh, it's probably some part of the ship" or "this must be a certain cut of meat," I don't bother looking it up. There have been too many times when I bustle off into Cunliffe only to find, "Nobody knows what this word means, but apparently it's a part of the ship." Thanks lol! This has not been my experience in Latin, except for some technical terms and obscure plant names in Vergil (I don't mean the Aeneid!). I think there's a lot more Latin literature from all eras for the lexicographers to work from, and so I get the feeling, while in the dictionary, that the word I'm looking up will help me in my future reading. AT LEAST most Greek words are made up of other, more common, Greek words and so at the advanced level you can grok a compound you've never seen before.
I long ago came to the conclusion that strong understanding of vocabulary is the single most important thing in language. If one has a deep and wide ranging knowledge of word meanings (even just in terms of passive recognition) then only a somewhat sketchy knowledge of the essential grammar will suffice to make texts highly transparent. This is something that native speakers of modern Italian or Spanish (for example) can benefit from if learning Latin - a high percentage of the vocabulary will be instantly recognisable to them. And if language is transparent then we can easily and pleasurably interact with it by extensively reading things which interest us. It is in this way that we deepen and reenforce language knowledge. But of course when it comes to something like Ancient Greek it's something of a conundrum to know how to build that body of vocabulary...
Ancient greek is the richest language and the MOST important. That s WHY almost every term in fields such as science,math, poetry are... Greek words. I haven't seen ANY sumerian or Sanskrit word 🤔 Unfortunately it s a language that cannot be taught by a foreigner and i m not saying this with a weird insinuation. But it s the reality.
Lol is this Jezus Burgess from op wtf 😂
I'm interested in learning both Latin and Ancient Greek. Would it be recommended to focus on one of them first, i.e. Latin, or do you think it's possible to learn both of them at the same time?
Thanks for this video, Luke! I agree about the Gospels and An Ephesian Tale being very easy... Afterwards, there is more choice. For example, I find Xenophon's Greek histories easy. I also wanted to ask you: Do you still use your FB account? I wrote to you a lot of time ago but I don't think you have read my message. Otherwise, how should I contact you? Thanks!
If someone knows what s an SOV language, ancient greek is also all the variations... It can be also VOS, SVO etc etc. This is what makes it complicated BUT simple at the same time ❤
How many times do you think rereading is helpful? When do diminishing returns kick in? When is it time to move to something else? Once you can read through the respective work fluently in the original? Thank you for this video, as for every one!
I took ancient Greek at university 15 years ago. Hansen and Quinn. Hardest thing I ever did. I never did get the accents comoletely down.
Exceptions to exceptions. Drives a person nuts.
Hi Luke. What do you think of using Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana in the early and intermediate stages as part of the extensive reading plan? It contains parallel texts of conversations and (somewhat) graded original works.
Oh man, 26yrs ago, I took a Classical Greek seminar, 8 credit hrs. Was cruising along, seemed so easy, until they whipped out the final. It flushed the entire class down the toilet. Went from A- to C in the course ... and that was 8 credit hours worth of C. Three cnormal classes worth of C. That course alone dropped my degree from summa cum laude to merely cum laude LOL
Obviously the professors (there were 2) expected a whole 'nother level of self-directed study. Unfortunately they hadn't built in any checks along the way, and we were lead down a primrose path.
THe kicker on th efinal was that the profs put a passage at the end and said "if you can translate this with 90% accuracy you can skip the rest of the test and will receive an A for the course." I stared at it in uncomprehending horror .... it was all Greek to me! Har, har.
I'm currently learning Scottish Gaelic and I've dabbled with Old Irish, and it's the same situation. All the learning materials are SO focused on teaching grammar instead of basic vocabulary, -ō stems and -ā stems and copulas and yadda yadda and it's like, I just want to read about Étaín getting turned into a moth and blown around Ireland by Midir's jealous wife.
I am interested in learning Old Celtic languages, especially of Britain's proto-language.
@52:16, @polýMATHY, What you are describing regarding playing the role of a teacher sounds rather like the models for question and answer presented by Rouse in his "The Teaching of Greek at the Perse School, Cambridge" report for his Department of Education. Have you read it? It's fabulous.
You must go from language learning to language creating . After having ste general structure of languages down then learning a partucular one is much much easier.
Thanks Nostalgia critic, you'll remember ancient Greek so I don't have to
Is the Ranieri-Roberts approach also effective for modern Greek?
First, we are learning the written language, which is usually more complex than the spoken one (save the various dialects like Italian or German ;-) and aimed at well-educated people. Conversely, _Koinè_ or _New Testament_ Greek are far easier. Second, all languages have some breaking point, before which learning is difficult. Once you've passed that point, everything becomes easier.
Ancient greek are a whole new level buddy. I understand what you re saying which is correct but it s different for this language.
44:02 Oh my God, Callirhoe from the class in the last semester of grad school has come back to haunt me.
Actually, if Ethiopica got mentioned, then I’d be haunted.
Oh no, why was it unpleasant? Callirrhoe is one of the best things I’ve read in a while.
I think it was just hard. I wasn’t disciplined enough for the workload of this Greek Novel class & so I’d read as much of the English of the chapter as possible (which was part of the assignment), speed read the Greek (translate but with enough understanding to retranslate in class, since reading from a prepared translation was rightfully discouraged), & I usually ignored the accompanying articles. They were interesting, but secondary scholarship told me I wasn’t meant for academia.
But I certainly want to go back to some of the novels someday.
Luke! Where can i buy that mug at 1:20????
Please explain to the phobic ones that the tenses of irregular verbs are simply formed by different verbs which are fascinating because they give so many derivatives.
Take the verb λέγω. In the past the type ειπον is used which relates to έπος. In the past perfect the type ειρηκα is used, related to the future ερεω or ειρεω related to ρητός (explicit), ρήτωρ (orator), ρησις (dictum) etc!
Αλήθεια! Μ’ αρέσει
@@polyMATHY_Luke Go ~ went
ONE tip for someone who wants to learn Greek in general,not the ancient one: JUST listen to the numbers sounds from 1-10. Then memorise them and TRY to connect the sounds to the letters❤ Do this and THEN continue to grammar bla bla. Of course the letters might be hard because they aren't Latin but gradually you ll get used to it.
Graecum est, non legitur.
Thank you very much, Luke!
Salve Luci! I would appreciate your opinion about the Assimil course for (Attic) Ancient Greek (Le Grec Ancien) including it‘s pronunciation on the audio material.
I could‘nt find written macrons in it BUT every text/word is pronounced clearly on the audio material, so I wanted to ask if it‘s possible to know every vocal length only by hearing the audio without seeing written macrons?
Hi there, I know the Assmil Ancient Greek course quite well. The text’s simple dialogues and easy are quite nice, but the presentation is atrocious and confusing. I learned a number of useful things from reading it, since the main text is composed well. So it’s not useless. But if you don’t know French you may not have a lot to help you.
The audio is one of the worst pronounced Ancient Greek I’ve heard in my life. I believe one of the vocal artists is attempting to use an Attic pronunciation but has no clue how to do that at the most fundamental level. Thus I do not recommend the audio.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thank you Luke! I did'nt expect that the audios are so bad :( I bought the course because I want to learn Ancient Greek in Attic pronounciation and need something for beginners before starting with Athenaze... I found your Attic readings for Athenaze but your Ancient Greek in Action is in Lucian pronounciation... Is there anything you can recommend?
I always feel like an outsider in languages communities. Orthography, vocabulary, and pronunciation all come to me very, very easily. It’s the grammar that is the absolute bane of my existence. Arabic, Russian, Latin, Greek, Polish, Hebrew, Chinese; it’s the grammar that I can hardly grasp without referencing my cheat sheets.
How s your greek pronunciation
@@EmpireOfLEMBERG Byzantine, Modern, Attic, and Late Koine all down pat 👍
Hunch (since I haven't even completed a first year Greek grammar): Could it be that the authors of so many Greek textbooks don't expose students to some aspects of the grammar, because they are 1. teaching to the exams, 2. are keeping it "short" since they don't expect many students to continue reading Greek anyway?
9:30 Yeah, it's one of those funny grammar quirks that most languages in Europe do, but for some reason English doesn't. Certainly true for all Slavic, all Romance, and German.
In Germany, the students are expected to study only Attic, but then the Abitur is all about Homer, to the point that the written exam often has a question on either explaining the difference between the Homeric form and Attic, or providing the Attic form for a Homeric form. (A few years ago, we also had to read the Pre-Socratics, but I've never seen an Attic text as a required text for the German students.)
Good luck then with Homeric greek 😆
Fun fact:
For Agamemnon's compatriot He speaks a rather swell English)