I’ve been working on teaching myself Attic Greek for about three weeks now.
My previous experience with Attic Greek came from a semester of it in college (Spring of 2014).
I made one half-hearted attempt back in 2017 to self-study it, and am trying again now.
This post will cover some of my motivations in learning and writing about my learning, and also my current progress.
I write this because I imagine that anyone who is interested in self-teaching Attic Greek using textbooks and primary sources will have a rough go of things (as I have), and could find it helpful to have a consistent voice describing what has gone well (or been hard) along the way, rather than trying to piece together knowledge across disparate forum posts.
Writing will also crystallize some of my own knowledge. And if I do enough of this, and actually learn Greek to any degree of proficiency, I could try to spin up any of my writings along the way into a longer-form guide. I think it would be cool for me to experiment with different learning techniques the sources and technology at my disposal to see what works well and what doesn’t. For example, flashcards, flowcharts, plain old book learning, and so on. Aspirationally, contributing a valuable educational resource would be pretty cool.
My primary motivations for learning (any) pre-modern form of Greek were:
- Be able to read the Greek New Testament
- Stick with it
- Be able to read Plato
Given the first options in isolation, learning Koine over Attic seemed obvious, particularly since it’s supposed to be simpler. I think there is also a larger online community and set of resources available for Koine rather than Attic. However, I want to be able to read the writings of Attic writers.
Lots of anonymous internet “experts” suggest that unless you know you will only ever read Koine, you should just learn Attic, as it is easier to learn Koine from Attic than Attic from Koine.
- Anki (for flashcards)
- Introduction to Attic Greek, 2nd Edition by Donald Mastronarde
- (Also, the answer key)
- Greek-English New Testament, Nestle-Aland 28th Edition (NA28)
- I have the cloth-over-board edition.
- A hotkey on my keyboard that switches my keys into Classical Greek mode.
- Lots of legal pads and pens of different colors
- http://atticgreek.org/ which is the companion website for Mastronarde’s text
- I have also been making use of Bill Mounce’s website for his book, Basic Biblical Greek, consulting it for extra words (mostly just nouns) to make it easier to read some of the New Testament texts.
My basic plan so far has involved going through Mastronarde’s text, chapter by chapter, reading everything, sometimes a couple times, and generally making each new word or form into one or more Anki flashcards. I’ll also take new ideas or concepts I didn’t know before and make flashcards from those as well.
I’m currently on chapter 5 – verbs.
Prior to chapter 5, I’ve done all exercises for the chapter, but I probably will only do the odds or evens for future chapters since it’s very time-consuming and repetitive to do all problems before moving on.
Occasionally I will attempt reading and reading out loud longer chunks of the New Testament, and will also add some of Bill Mounce’s recommended vocabulary into Anki from time to time to aid in that effort.
- The rules governing accents are much easier to understand through recognizing which accent pattern a given word fits into, than by memorizing accent “rules” around when one accent appears versus another.
- I like Mastronarde’s 2nd edition much better than the 1st edition, but I can’t directly compare as I no longer have the 1st edition. It seems like there is a lot more background context in the 2nd edition. I also think that I partly stopped learning Greek the last time in 2017 because I couldn’t figure out accents, and in this edition, there is a nice disclaimer that tells the user they should not worry too much about accents :) . I don’t recall that disclaimer being in the previous edition!
- Highly inflected languages seem to give you more freedom in expression, at the cost of having to follow the rules for various inflections. Languages that are not highly inflected (like English) seem to require many little words + particles to explicitly express the grammar of a sentence, as well as a very static phrase structure, but with the benefit of not needing to (explicitly) know various inflections.
I’d like to back-fill some of my key takeaways from each chapter of Mastronarde so far, and what has worked (or not worked) for me so far.
If I end up producing any substantial resources (flashcards, word lists, flowcharts), I’d also need to check in with the publisher to make sure any reproduction falls under fair use.