Seconded on both qualifications. I've been studying 19 years, i teach undergraduates at university, and much of Thucydides is still like a pushing through a dense thicket.
Not to discourage you from reading it. It's an incredibly rich literary tradition. Just don't expect to be reading at native speed anytime soon, if at all. The Ancient Greek that people are speaking on YouTube doesn't come close to literary texts in their complexity, just like no one ever spoke with the sam syntactical complexity as Charles Dickens or Jane Austen. They are two different cognitive processes.
Looking back now, I have studied a long time, but I was badly taught (as all are) and I have been rectifying these mistakes and experimenting with new learning methods since. I would definitely be further ahead by now if I had done it right from the beginning.
Recently I've been studying modern Greek for 2 years, which has changed the game for how I read Ancient Greek. I've just picked up the New Testament and I'm reading the gospel of Matthew somewhere close to native speed (with vocab help).
My big piece of advice is if you want to read quicker from left to right, you have to speak the words whenever you read them. Your brain needs to connect the visual script with the sounds to digest it as a real language.
The advice that no one wants to hear is: if you want to read Ancient Greek fluently, begin with Modern Greek for a few years and slowly work your way backwards through Koine (i.e. the New Testament) and Hellenistic and then to Classical Greek. It will be slow, but if I had done that from the very beginning, I would be fluent in a modern language and much better than I am today at reading Ancient Greek.
Linger on here and you will find lots of advice and tips on learning. Some of it is good and some bad, but at least you will not be alone.
My final piece of advice is to remember that learning is a lifelong process. Stick at it regular and steady and daily for 20/30 years and you'll be reading like the very best academics in the world. Good luck!
> The advice that no one wants to hear is: if you want to read Ancient Greek fluently, begin with Modern Greek for a few years and slowly work your way backwards through Koine (i.e. the New Testament) and Hellenistic and then to Classical Greek.
This is interesting advice- but how much does the benefit of this depend on having an interest in knowing modern Greek? Party interesting because some of the other advice I've seen that has said to start with Homeric and work forward...
How different is this approach from, say, recommending that people who want to learn Latin well start with Italian and work back via Early Moder/Medieval Latin/Ecclesial Latin and then Classical, rather than starting with Plautus and working forward?
To your final question, I would say: yes, that is probably the best way to do it, work backwards from Italian.
In regards to other advice on the order of learning: when we are born, are we brought up first as English speakers (assuming you are) to read Beowulf and then Chaucer and then Shakespeare and Marlowe to arrive at, say, Romantic poetry and Victorian novels? No, because the best way to learn a language is to begin with what is most widely available, what will offer the most chance of immersion to gain fluency. You sure as hell wouldn't advise a foreign language learner if English to learn in that order. From the modern working backwards, you can pick up the changes in morphology and syntax easily and adjust your strong framework of Greek fluency.
Homer makes a terrible starting text and I would strongly disagree with those who advocate it: the dialect itself is an artifical construct; there are many words which only appear once in it; the morphology is very different. As a learning tool it is very poor because there is not so much you can carry over to Archaic or Classical Greek. You would also have to slave away over Homer when you are least equipped to do so, and why would anyone want to turn the greatest work of literature (Iliad, not Odyssey - fight me) into a joyless grind? I did that at university. It was grim.
I didn't initially have any interest in Modern Greek and I learned Ancient Greek in the grammar-translate method as employed for the last two hundred years. I got tolerably good at producing translations of passages in exams, but working through a whole text took an age. 20 lines of hard text could easily take an hour. The problem I have since found is that, because I was neither speaking, writing, nor hearing Ancient Greek, my brain couldn't appreciate it as a fluid language and accept reading it left to right. Yes, you heard it: in British schools and universities, you don't learn to read Greek or Latin left to write. They didn't even teach me accents, because it was considered too difficult and superfluous. But that is only the case if you never say it out loud and engage with the sounds.
Once I started learning Modern Greek, I realised the Ancient Greek is to Modern Greek what Middle Engoish is to modern English. It is part of the spectrum of the same language. The number of words and roots which are shared between Modern and Ancient is wild considering they are 'separated' by 2400 years. I am now reading Ancient Greek left to right (simpler texts like Xenophon and the New Testament), and when I read I can hear the sounds of the words in my head, and I can appreciate the word arrangement (Modern Greek preserves a lot of the flexibility of Ancient Greekword orders). I am even gaining a deeper appreciation of nuance, tonal range and metaphor in words selection which I never could before.
If I could do it again I would 100% learn Modern and work back. But also in that parallel world I would just be Greek and it wouldn't be a problem. I've studied alongside Greek postgrads at Oxford and their level of Ancient Greek is unreal compared to ours. It's because it's the same language to them.
Καλό διάβασμα και καλή τύχη! If you have any more questions feel free to hit me up here or in DMs
>when we are born, are we brought up first as English speakers (assuming you are) to read Beowulf and then Chaucer and then Shakespeare and Marlowe to arrive at, say, Romantic poetry and Victorian novels? No, because the best way to learn a language is to begin with what is most widely available, what will offer the most chance of immersion to gain fluency. You sure as hell wouldn't advise a foreign language learner if English to learn in that order.
That's such a false equivalence. Obviously you wouldn't advise a learner of modern English to read Beowulf because it's in a language that isn't modern English. If someone wants to learn Latin however, obviously it's better to start with simple Latin than with Italian.
It's not a false equivalence at all. Firstly, and mainly, because we are talking about Greek, not Latin. The difference between Italian and Latin is far greater than Greek and Ancient Greek. Learning modern Greek is like learning Simple Latin in the analogy of your comment.
My notes were written in answer to a previous comment about the practice of learning Ancient Greek from the ground up, beginning with Homer and moving through to Hellenistic. I picked Victorian novels as a rough equivalent to reading a Demosthenes, Plato, Thucydides. I hold by this absolutely. The difference between Homer and Hellenistic is massive, arguably greater than Koine and modern Greek.
The primary reason for learning Modern Greek first is because that way you get used to the sounds, rhythm and accent of the language. Yes I know they don't sound the same and no I don't think it matters (in the same we don't try and read Shakespeare in Restored Pronunciation). The most important thing for the purpose of reading a target language fluently (which was the origin of this thread) is to establish it in the brain as a real language, i.e. with sounds and symbols and rhythms.
People seriously underestimate how much overlap there is. As you mentioned vocabulary alone (through word stems) gives you a huge boost. It's even better if you can spend some time studying early 20th c. Katharevousa. With that alone one should be set to delve into Koine. Even my grandmother who barely finished primary school could tackle gospel passages.
It should be noted though that native Greek speakers are organically exposed to a very wide range of Greek, that a learner will have to seek out more deliberately. For instance, a tutor will likely not expose you to Katharevousa (or say, suggest you read literature like Emmanouel Roides) unless they know you have an interest in exploring the language more, but any tutor worth their money will make sidesteps into etymology or ancient Greek rules (like, why is κάθοδος when it's κατά + οδός).
I've made the case of learning Modern Greek as an aid for ancient, but being Greek it always feels kinda self-serving, so it's nice to see it advocated by someone who's actually done it. 😅
Dan Wallace, who spent 17 years writing one of the most respected advanced Koine Greek grammars, would most likely agree with you.
He makes the case that very little has changed between Koine Greek and Modern Greek in 2000 years, as compared with English, which changed a lot in a few hundred years.
The challenge for me is that, while you are right about the fluency, it takes a long time to learn this way from what I have researched.
There was a social media post I had access to where a European man moved to Greece to live. It took him 2 years to get to a conversational level with the wrong case inflections. After 10 years, people didn't believe him when he said he was not Greek.
There is an option that teaches Ancient Greek as a living language, which is the Polis Institute, where Angela Taylor from "Alpha with Angela" learned Greek (as well as teaching herself), but being older, I don't have the time or the unlimited funds to move there.
[https://youtu.be/kFXF7qUXhd4?si=kbSLKYK\_kB12pZR0](https://youtu.be/kFXF7qUXhd4?si=kbSLKYK_kB12pZR0)
It's the same with any language: spend enough time with it and you will become fluent. Language learning is a simple matter of quantity and absolutely nothing else.
What happens, however, when most schools teach Classics is that they don't teach you a language, they teach you how to decode it. Learning this way provides very quick and noticeable results in the beginning, but because it is not language acquisition, there is a glass ceiling to it.
I asked my professor at Edinburgh uni where I did my undergraduate if the professors could read fluently left to right and he said that it was rare and normally text specific.
I'm not going to pontificate on what you can and cannot do learning Greek, you're free to proceed however you wish. I have found over the years of my own study, that it would have been quicker if I had learnt Modern Greek from the beginning to a comfortable B2/C1 level and then started working on older stuff. People who think Ancient Greek can't be read as a real language are wrong, but no one will ever get there with it by using the 'traditional' textbooks.
'Traditional' is in commas because this is not actually how it was taught for most of history, only in the last 200 years. This is also when linguistic ability in Greek and Latin started to decline. Go figure.
That may be a good approach for people interested in the whole sweep of Greek civilization, but not for someone like me. I have no interest in modern Greek culture, and an active dislike of Christianity, so I would find reading/ listening to modern Greek content boring at best, and reading the New Testament or anything about Christianity to be a miserable slog. Taking that approach for me would probably result in me giving up before I ever got to the period of Greek history that I am actually interested in.
Taking your analogy of English, if someone was strictly interested in Old English, I don't think that learning Modern English would be very helpful.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. If you don't want to learn Modern Greek then there's no point learning, I'm very happy to concede that. The premise of the thread was how long it took to read Ancient Greek fluently. The point I was trying to make was that if you wanted yo learn to read Ancient Greek fluently as quickly as possible, starting with Modern Greek would be the most efficient way.
If someone was strictly interested in Old English and exclusively read that, then they would never read it fluently, because there is so little extant literature they would have memerised the words before they were fluently readers. Ancient Greek literature is far more complicated than the spoken words would have been. Reaching a level where it could be read fluently with all of its nuanced word usages, it's funny words orders and the like is very difficult. Believe me, I've tried. And that's before you learn to read with the sounds as well (most Ancient Greek translators/readers do not formulate the sound when they read).
The biggest benefit with Modern Greek is that it fills the gap that we have lost in being able to immerse ourselves in an environment where Ancient Greek was lived as the sole means of communication.
I would also say that don't be so quick to knock off any post Classical Greek. Everything written from the Hellenistic period on was engaging with the tradition and heritage of the Classical period. The later books of the old testament, such as Ecclesiastes, is deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, various poems of the Anacreontea (poems written in imitation of Anacreon, an Archaic poet) were written in the Byzantine period. In the modern, there is the poet Cavafy, who is truly wonderful, and his poems meditate on the way that Ancient Greece has shaped the modern psyche. We have historically made the mistake in the West, from the 18th century on, to view modern and Ancient Greece as two different countries and two different peoples, and it has been very much to our detriment. It is all one incredibly rich and unbroken cultural and literary tapestry.
Yeah, you make good points. It's certainly true that there is not nearly enough content in Ancient Greek, and what exists (other than pedagogical readers) is typically complex. And that's just reading. Listening material is almost nonexistent. Certainly for a Classicist or academic in a similar field your approach would be useful.
I certainly agree that learning to speak the language (any language) is essential for fluent reading. I've only begun learning Ancient Greek in the past few months, but the first thing I did was learn the phonology, and when I read I either read aloud to myself or "say the words" in my head, which is how I've always read English, too.
It sounds like you're going about things in a good way then. It is amazing how many people make only a cursory attempt to learn the sounds and accents. Good luck with it and I hope you enjoy! I'm a teacher of Latin and Greek so feel free to DM me of you need advice (which would be given completely freely of course).
Professor Mary Beard studied Classics, so she learned both Latin and Greek. She specialised in Latin. She wrote once that she still found Thucydides difficult in places.
Even people in antiquity found him difficult and you’ll often find advice in books about rhetoric to not take him as an example when it comes to good style.
Fortunately though he has been researched extremely thoroughly over the past 1000 years and the text as a whole is pretty well understood nowadays.
Native Greek speaker here. Any Greek who’s more academically minded than not can cruise through most of the New Testament without major problems. It’s just not that different; think Shakespeare.
With Attic texts, it gets a lot trickier. Now, let me be clear, I can bring out a pdf of Plato’s Cave Allegory and all but rap it. That does **not** mean I know what it says. Even for us natives, learning Ancient Greek is a demanding endeavor, and it takes a while to get the hang of it. I will say though, it’s self evident that being native speakers of Greek gives us a non negligible advantage in this journey. There is a lot of vocab crossover and the syntax isn’t the fuckfest that Homeric syntax is. The main thing natives have to practice is AG grammar. That’s with that.
Now, I don’t know the extend to which MG helps with Homer, but I imagine it’s infinitesimal. I’m sure that using the reverse technique, ie using MG to learn AG, and AG to tackle Homeric Greek, is helpful; but going from MG to Homeric Greek is not a thing. I’ve never understood an unseen homeric extract without devoting 20 minutes of my life making vague and obscure connections in terms of vocabulary and syntax, just to get the approximate meaning of half a sentence. The other half will frustratingly always consist of a combination of hapax legomena, weird grammar, other obscure vocabulary, and the most awkward syntax you can imagine.
People seriously underestimate this. I was looking out of curiosity the current ancient Greek textbook for first grade junior highschoolers (13 year-olds). It's kinda nuts, if you REALLY think about it.
http://ebooks.edu.gr/ebooks/v/html/8547/2244/Archaia-Elliniki-Glossa_A-Gymnasiou_html-empl/index.html
(You switch chapters from the arrows and dropdown menu, top right)
I think it's important to say that there are some more and less easy classical texts as well. I have come across texts that have been completely intelligible, just like the new testament and others that have been a lot harder.
Throughout this endeavor for me modern Greek gives you not just a non-neglible advantage, but also pretty much a very widespread insight that makes learning to read ancient texts a lot easier than it would have been if you started off without it.
A long time, and not only for the reasons we tend to think. Remember that if you read books you have read millions upon millions of words in your native language, laying aside the easy mastery of a language that comes from learning from birth, years of schooling, writing and drilling, speaking, and so on... Personally I'm not there yet - though I can read large chunks of the New Testament or the Septuagint at pretty close to my (fast) English reading speed, I can't do it with even the harder bits of those, let alone some proper Attic. And getting to the point where you can scan through a text properly is really, really hard.
Firstly, reading fast in a new script is a *lot* harder than we think. There was a report done by FSI (who teach US diplomats fast and intensively) called 'Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching'. It's brilliant - one of those things every serious language learner should read. (It's available [here](http://sealang.net/archives/sla/gurt_1999_07.pdf), but apparently not secure, so you might prefer to find it elsewhere). One of the many invaluable lessons from it is that people reading in a new script take a *lot* longer to read at native speed than you would think intuitively. It's easy to get to the point where you read subconsciously and without apparent effort, whether that's Greek, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, or whatever - and I have found it so (with Greek, Farsi and Hebrew). You aren't conscious in any way of being slowed down - but you are. It takes a *lot* of time for your mind to start absorbing naturally it at the same speed that you do with a language you have read for years. You need to read a lot. Personally I noticed this with the difference between my Latin and Greek reading speeds - it was enormously easier to get to a rapid reading speed in Latin. Obviously there are a few factors there, but not least is the script.
Secondly, you are unlikely to really get to regular reading speeds without ample listening. Listening forces you to process a language in real time - however you learned, large amounts of listening are necessary to get to rapid reading speeds. That's hard in ancient Greek because there is so little recorded.
Thirdly, you do need to read a lot, and to read a mixture of easy and hard stuff. Paul Nation's '[What do you need to know to learn a foreign language](https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/paul-nations-publications/publications/documents/foreign-language_1125.pdf)' (another classic!) talks about the need to balance input that is learning-focused (slower, more challenging) with fluency-focused reading (fast! easy)! You will *never* get fast if you only read hard texts, going from one to the other. You will never be able to read hard texts if you only read easy ones. That means that a balance is needed, and, particularly, lots of re-reading helps. It is good to go through plenty of easy beginner texts - Italian Athenaze springs to mind - but you also need to make harder texts easy, by re-reading them enough times that you can read easily.
Fourthly, good knowledge is necessary. You need to meet as few road blocks in your reading as possible - whether that's syntax you don't understand, words you don't know, or grammar points you don't fully grasp. Real study is necessary - when I've tried to pick up languages from more input-oriented methods, I've hit those roadblocks often. Get lots of input, but ruthlessly identify your weaknesses, the ones that slow you down, and work on them directly. Realistically you need to pick up at least 12,000 words for wide ranging reading with good speed, so most people will need some focused vocabulary study at some point (Anki is great, used rightly); you will need to consult a textbook sometimes for issues.
Meanwhile, again, read lots, and read out loud as much as you can.
I am currently reading through the Septuagint in ancient Greek at a decent pace after about a year of studying both ancient and modern Greek. I consider "decent" to be about half an hour per chapter, I can read verses here and there without needing to consult a dictionary or interlinear, and for the most part I could give basic dictionary definitions for common words.
Tbf, I have a bit of an advantage because I come from a background in English literature, I speak French as a second language, and I am familiar with the Tanakh in English, French, and some verses and chapters I have studied in Latin, Hebrew, or Yiddish. But I did not speak any Greek before a year or so ago.
Fluency in Greek, either ancient or modern, requires years of consistent study and practice. While not as difficult for a native English speaker to pick up as a language like Mandarin or Arabic, Greek is still *very* challenging for English speakers because it is not rooted in Latin or Germanic - it is Greek. While there is a lot of vocabulary cross-over with English and other European languages, the grammar is very challenging, particularly the sheer amount of conjugation and declension.
If you are doing at least 1 hour every single day, I would say from my experience that it takes about a year to have basic competency. I'm not expecting to be fluent or to be able to hold anything beyond basic conversations until I'm 3-4 years in.
As far as vocabulary goes, it seems daunting, but you'll quickly pick up on how many of those 5000 words are constructed from the same stems and lemmas. The example I find most useful is στρατός, army.
From στρατός, we get στρατηγική, στρατόκρατια, στρατηγός, στρατιώτης... Strategy, Militarism, General, Soldier.
It takes a bit of adjustment to figure out how the lemmas and stems connect and affect each other, but if you think about it, in Greek, all five words have the same root, while in English, all five words seem totally unrelated.
In terms of speed, afaik, modern Greek is one of the fastest languages on earth, and that is in part because of the regular use of words that are 6-8 syllables long, compared to English, where most words are 3-5 syllables. So even though the average native Greek speaker clocks in around a blistering 9 syllables per second, they're probably only saying 1 or 2 words.
Imo, the best way to adapt to this in any language you're learning is to find native-speaking podcasts with transcripts (or audiobooks with a written edition in front of you), slow the speed down to a level you're comfortable with (I think about .75 is a good starting point), and then *read along out loud*, pausing if you fall behind or need to look up an unfamiliar stem.
I find this form of practice to be particularly excruciating, and you will *always* feel incompetent, but if you track your progress week to week or month to month, you will see marked improvements. You will very likely *never* be as comfortable, fast, or confident as a native speaker, but that's not the goal; the goal is to be better than you were last week.
BA and MA in Classics and there are still texts that are cryptic and need a lot of time to decode.
Seconded on both qualifications. I've been studying 19 years, i teach undergraduates at university, and much of Thucydides is still like a pushing through a dense thicket. Not to discourage you from reading it. It's an incredibly rich literary tradition. Just don't expect to be reading at native speed anytime soon, if at all. The Ancient Greek that people are speaking on YouTube doesn't come close to literary texts in their complexity, just like no one ever spoke with the sam syntactical complexity as Charles Dickens or Jane Austen. They are two different cognitive processes. Looking back now, I have studied a long time, but I was badly taught (as all are) and I have been rectifying these mistakes and experimenting with new learning methods since. I would definitely be further ahead by now if I had done it right from the beginning. Recently I've been studying modern Greek for 2 years, which has changed the game for how I read Ancient Greek. I've just picked up the New Testament and I'm reading the gospel of Matthew somewhere close to native speed (with vocab help). My big piece of advice is if you want to read quicker from left to right, you have to speak the words whenever you read them. Your brain needs to connect the visual script with the sounds to digest it as a real language. The advice that no one wants to hear is: if you want to read Ancient Greek fluently, begin with Modern Greek for a few years and slowly work your way backwards through Koine (i.e. the New Testament) and Hellenistic and then to Classical Greek. It will be slow, but if I had done that from the very beginning, I would be fluent in a modern language and much better than I am today at reading Ancient Greek. Linger on here and you will find lots of advice and tips on learning. Some of it is good and some bad, but at least you will not be alone. My final piece of advice is to remember that learning is a lifelong process. Stick at it regular and steady and daily for 20/30 years and you'll be reading like the very best academics in the world. Good luck!
> The advice that no one wants to hear is: if you want to read Ancient Greek fluently, begin with Modern Greek for a few years and slowly work your way backwards through Koine (i.e. the New Testament) and Hellenistic and then to Classical Greek. This is interesting advice- but how much does the benefit of this depend on having an interest in knowing modern Greek? Party interesting because some of the other advice I've seen that has said to start with Homeric and work forward... How different is this approach from, say, recommending that people who want to learn Latin well start with Italian and work back via Early Moder/Medieval Latin/Ecclesial Latin and then Classical, rather than starting with Plautus and working forward?
To your final question, I would say: yes, that is probably the best way to do it, work backwards from Italian. In regards to other advice on the order of learning: when we are born, are we brought up first as English speakers (assuming you are) to read Beowulf and then Chaucer and then Shakespeare and Marlowe to arrive at, say, Romantic poetry and Victorian novels? No, because the best way to learn a language is to begin with what is most widely available, what will offer the most chance of immersion to gain fluency. You sure as hell wouldn't advise a foreign language learner if English to learn in that order. From the modern working backwards, you can pick up the changes in morphology and syntax easily and adjust your strong framework of Greek fluency. Homer makes a terrible starting text and I would strongly disagree with those who advocate it: the dialect itself is an artifical construct; there are many words which only appear once in it; the morphology is very different. As a learning tool it is very poor because there is not so much you can carry over to Archaic or Classical Greek. You would also have to slave away over Homer when you are least equipped to do so, and why would anyone want to turn the greatest work of literature (Iliad, not Odyssey - fight me) into a joyless grind? I did that at university. It was grim. I didn't initially have any interest in Modern Greek and I learned Ancient Greek in the grammar-translate method as employed for the last two hundred years. I got tolerably good at producing translations of passages in exams, but working through a whole text took an age. 20 lines of hard text could easily take an hour. The problem I have since found is that, because I was neither speaking, writing, nor hearing Ancient Greek, my brain couldn't appreciate it as a fluid language and accept reading it left to right. Yes, you heard it: in British schools and universities, you don't learn to read Greek or Latin left to write. They didn't even teach me accents, because it was considered too difficult and superfluous. But that is only the case if you never say it out loud and engage with the sounds. Once I started learning Modern Greek, I realised the Ancient Greek is to Modern Greek what Middle Engoish is to modern English. It is part of the spectrum of the same language. The number of words and roots which are shared between Modern and Ancient is wild considering they are 'separated' by 2400 years. I am now reading Ancient Greek left to right (simpler texts like Xenophon and the New Testament), and when I read I can hear the sounds of the words in my head, and I can appreciate the word arrangement (Modern Greek preserves a lot of the flexibility of Ancient Greekword orders). I am even gaining a deeper appreciation of nuance, tonal range and metaphor in words selection which I never could before. If I could do it again I would 100% learn Modern and work back. But also in that parallel world I would just be Greek and it wouldn't be a problem. I've studied alongside Greek postgrads at Oxford and their level of Ancient Greek is unreal compared to ours. It's because it's the same language to them. Καλό διάβασμα και καλή τύχη! If you have any more questions feel free to hit me up here or in DMs
>when we are born, are we brought up first as English speakers (assuming you are) to read Beowulf and then Chaucer and then Shakespeare and Marlowe to arrive at, say, Romantic poetry and Victorian novels? No, because the best way to learn a language is to begin with what is most widely available, what will offer the most chance of immersion to gain fluency. You sure as hell wouldn't advise a foreign language learner if English to learn in that order. That's such a false equivalence. Obviously you wouldn't advise a learner of modern English to read Beowulf because it's in a language that isn't modern English. If someone wants to learn Latin however, obviously it's better to start with simple Latin than with Italian.
It's not a false equivalence at all. Firstly, and mainly, because we are talking about Greek, not Latin. The difference between Italian and Latin is far greater than Greek and Ancient Greek. Learning modern Greek is like learning Simple Latin in the analogy of your comment. My notes were written in answer to a previous comment about the practice of learning Ancient Greek from the ground up, beginning with Homer and moving through to Hellenistic. I picked Victorian novels as a rough equivalent to reading a Demosthenes, Plato, Thucydides. I hold by this absolutely. The difference between Homer and Hellenistic is massive, arguably greater than Koine and modern Greek. The primary reason for learning Modern Greek first is because that way you get used to the sounds, rhythm and accent of the language. Yes I know they don't sound the same and no I don't think it matters (in the same we don't try and read Shakespeare in Restored Pronunciation). The most important thing for the purpose of reading a target language fluently (which was the origin of this thread) is to establish it in the brain as a real language, i.e. with sounds and symbols and rhythms.
People seriously underestimate how much overlap there is. As you mentioned vocabulary alone (through word stems) gives you a huge boost. It's even better if you can spend some time studying early 20th c. Katharevousa. With that alone one should be set to delve into Koine. Even my grandmother who barely finished primary school could tackle gospel passages. It should be noted though that native Greek speakers are organically exposed to a very wide range of Greek, that a learner will have to seek out more deliberately. For instance, a tutor will likely not expose you to Katharevousa (or say, suggest you read literature like Emmanouel Roides) unless they know you have an interest in exploring the language more, but any tutor worth their money will make sidesteps into etymology or ancient Greek rules (like, why is κάθοδος when it's κατά + οδός). I've made the case of learning Modern Greek as an aid for ancient, but being Greek it always feels kinda self-serving, so it's nice to see it advocated by someone who's actually done it. 😅
Same here. I have been studying and reading ancient greek for 15 years now and I feel that I still have a looooong way to go... Life is not enough lol
Dan Wallace, who spent 17 years writing one of the most respected advanced Koine Greek grammars, would most likely agree with you. He makes the case that very little has changed between Koine Greek and Modern Greek in 2000 years, as compared with English, which changed a lot in a few hundred years. The challenge for me is that, while you are right about the fluency, it takes a long time to learn this way from what I have researched. There was a social media post I had access to where a European man moved to Greece to live. It took him 2 years to get to a conversational level with the wrong case inflections. After 10 years, people didn't believe him when he said he was not Greek. There is an option that teaches Ancient Greek as a living language, which is the Polis Institute, where Angela Taylor from "Alpha with Angela" learned Greek (as well as teaching herself), but being older, I don't have the time or the unlimited funds to move there. [https://youtu.be/kFXF7qUXhd4?si=kbSLKYK\_kB12pZR0](https://youtu.be/kFXF7qUXhd4?si=kbSLKYK_kB12pZR0)
It's the same with any language: spend enough time with it and you will become fluent. Language learning is a simple matter of quantity and absolutely nothing else. What happens, however, when most schools teach Classics is that they don't teach you a language, they teach you how to decode it. Learning this way provides very quick and noticeable results in the beginning, but because it is not language acquisition, there is a glass ceiling to it. I asked my professor at Edinburgh uni where I did my undergraduate if the professors could read fluently left to right and he said that it was rare and normally text specific. I'm not going to pontificate on what you can and cannot do learning Greek, you're free to proceed however you wish. I have found over the years of my own study, that it would have been quicker if I had learnt Modern Greek from the beginning to a comfortable B2/C1 level and then started working on older stuff. People who think Ancient Greek can't be read as a real language are wrong, but no one will ever get there with it by using the 'traditional' textbooks. 'Traditional' is in commas because this is not actually how it was taught for most of history, only in the last 200 years. This is also when linguistic ability in Greek and Latin started to decline. Go figure.
That may be a good approach for people interested in the whole sweep of Greek civilization, but not for someone like me. I have no interest in modern Greek culture, and an active dislike of Christianity, so I would find reading/ listening to modern Greek content boring at best, and reading the New Testament or anything about Christianity to be a miserable slog. Taking that approach for me would probably result in me giving up before I ever got to the period of Greek history that I am actually interested in. Taking your analogy of English, if someone was strictly interested in Old English, I don't think that learning Modern English would be very helpful.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. If you don't want to learn Modern Greek then there's no point learning, I'm very happy to concede that. The premise of the thread was how long it took to read Ancient Greek fluently. The point I was trying to make was that if you wanted yo learn to read Ancient Greek fluently as quickly as possible, starting with Modern Greek would be the most efficient way. If someone was strictly interested in Old English and exclusively read that, then they would never read it fluently, because there is so little extant literature they would have memerised the words before they were fluently readers. Ancient Greek literature is far more complicated than the spoken words would have been. Reaching a level where it could be read fluently with all of its nuanced word usages, it's funny words orders and the like is very difficult. Believe me, I've tried. And that's before you learn to read with the sounds as well (most Ancient Greek translators/readers do not formulate the sound when they read). The biggest benefit with Modern Greek is that it fills the gap that we have lost in being able to immerse ourselves in an environment where Ancient Greek was lived as the sole means of communication. I would also say that don't be so quick to knock off any post Classical Greek. Everything written from the Hellenistic period on was engaging with the tradition and heritage of the Classical period. The later books of the old testament, such as Ecclesiastes, is deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, various poems of the Anacreontea (poems written in imitation of Anacreon, an Archaic poet) were written in the Byzantine period. In the modern, there is the poet Cavafy, who is truly wonderful, and his poems meditate on the way that Ancient Greece has shaped the modern psyche. We have historically made the mistake in the West, from the 18th century on, to view modern and Ancient Greece as two different countries and two different peoples, and it has been very much to our detriment. It is all one incredibly rich and unbroken cultural and literary tapestry.
Yeah, you make good points. It's certainly true that there is not nearly enough content in Ancient Greek, and what exists (other than pedagogical readers) is typically complex. And that's just reading. Listening material is almost nonexistent. Certainly for a Classicist or academic in a similar field your approach would be useful. I certainly agree that learning to speak the language (any language) is essential for fluent reading. I've only begun learning Ancient Greek in the past few months, but the first thing I did was learn the phonology, and when I read I either read aloud to myself or "say the words" in my head, which is how I've always read English, too.
It sounds like you're going about things in a good way then. It is amazing how many people make only a cursory attempt to learn the sounds and accents. Good luck with it and I hope you enjoy! I'm a teacher of Latin and Greek so feel free to DM me of you need advice (which would be given completely freely of course).
Professor Mary Beard studied Classics, so she learned both Latin and Greek. She specialised in Latin. She wrote once that she still found Thucydides difficult in places.
Even people in antiquity found him difficult and you’ll often find advice in books about rhetoric to not take him as an example when it comes to good style. Fortunately though he has been researched extremely thoroughly over the past 1000 years and the text as a whole is pretty well understood nowadays.
Native Greek speaker here. Any Greek who’s more academically minded than not can cruise through most of the New Testament without major problems. It’s just not that different; think Shakespeare. With Attic texts, it gets a lot trickier. Now, let me be clear, I can bring out a pdf of Plato’s Cave Allegory and all but rap it. That does **not** mean I know what it says. Even for us natives, learning Ancient Greek is a demanding endeavor, and it takes a while to get the hang of it. I will say though, it’s self evident that being native speakers of Greek gives us a non negligible advantage in this journey. There is a lot of vocab crossover and the syntax isn’t the fuckfest that Homeric syntax is. The main thing natives have to practice is AG grammar. That’s with that. Now, I don’t know the extend to which MG helps with Homer, but I imagine it’s infinitesimal. I’m sure that using the reverse technique, ie using MG to learn AG, and AG to tackle Homeric Greek, is helpful; but going from MG to Homeric Greek is not a thing. I’ve never understood an unseen homeric extract without devoting 20 minutes of my life making vague and obscure connections in terms of vocabulary and syntax, just to get the approximate meaning of half a sentence. The other half will frustratingly always consist of a combination of hapax legomena, weird grammar, other obscure vocabulary, and the most awkward syntax you can imagine.
People seriously underestimate this. I was looking out of curiosity the current ancient Greek textbook for first grade junior highschoolers (13 year-olds). It's kinda nuts, if you REALLY think about it. http://ebooks.edu.gr/ebooks/v/html/8547/2244/Archaia-Elliniki-Glossa_A-Gymnasiou_html-empl/index.html (You switch chapters from the arrows and dropdown menu, top right)
I think it's important to say that there are some more and less easy classical texts as well. I have come across texts that have been completely intelligible, just like the new testament and others that have been a lot harder. Throughout this endeavor for me modern Greek gives you not just a non-neglible advantage, but also pretty much a very widespread insight that makes learning to read ancient texts a lot easier than it would have been if you started off without it.
A long time, and not only for the reasons we tend to think. Remember that if you read books you have read millions upon millions of words in your native language, laying aside the easy mastery of a language that comes from learning from birth, years of schooling, writing and drilling, speaking, and so on... Personally I'm not there yet - though I can read large chunks of the New Testament or the Septuagint at pretty close to my (fast) English reading speed, I can't do it with even the harder bits of those, let alone some proper Attic. And getting to the point where you can scan through a text properly is really, really hard. Firstly, reading fast in a new script is a *lot* harder than we think. There was a report done by FSI (who teach US diplomats fast and intensively) called 'Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching'. It's brilliant - one of those things every serious language learner should read. (It's available [here](http://sealang.net/archives/sla/gurt_1999_07.pdf), but apparently not secure, so you might prefer to find it elsewhere). One of the many invaluable lessons from it is that people reading in a new script take a *lot* longer to read at native speed than you would think intuitively. It's easy to get to the point where you read subconsciously and without apparent effort, whether that's Greek, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, or whatever - and I have found it so (with Greek, Farsi and Hebrew). You aren't conscious in any way of being slowed down - but you are. It takes a *lot* of time for your mind to start absorbing naturally it at the same speed that you do with a language you have read for years. You need to read a lot. Personally I noticed this with the difference between my Latin and Greek reading speeds - it was enormously easier to get to a rapid reading speed in Latin. Obviously there are a few factors there, but not least is the script. Secondly, you are unlikely to really get to regular reading speeds without ample listening. Listening forces you to process a language in real time - however you learned, large amounts of listening are necessary to get to rapid reading speeds. That's hard in ancient Greek because there is so little recorded. Thirdly, you do need to read a lot, and to read a mixture of easy and hard stuff. Paul Nation's '[What do you need to know to learn a foreign language](https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/paul-nations-publications/publications/documents/foreign-language_1125.pdf)' (another classic!) talks about the need to balance input that is learning-focused (slower, more challenging) with fluency-focused reading (fast! easy)! You will *never* get fast if you only read hard texts, going from one to the other. You will never be able to read hard texts if you only read easy ones. That means that a balance is needed, and, particularly, lots of re-reading helps. It is good to go through plenty of easy beginner texts - Italian Athenaze springs to mind - but you also need to make harder texts easy, by re-reading them enough times that you can read easily. Fourthly, good knowledge is necessary. You need to meet as few road blocks in your reading as possible - whether that's syntax you don't understand, words you don't know, or grammar points you don't fully grasp. Real study is necessary - when I've tried to pick up languages from more input-oriented methods, I've hit those roadblocks often. Get lots of input, but ruthlessly identify your weaknesses, the ones that slow you down, and work on them directly. Realistically you need to pick up at least 12,000 words for wide ranging reading with good speed, so most people will need some focused vocabulary study at some point (Anki is great, used rightly); you will need to consult a textbook sometimes for issues. Meanwhile, again, read lots, and read out loud as much as you can.
I am currently reading through the Septuagint in ancient Greek at a decent pace after about a year of studying both ancient and modern Greek. I consider "decent" to be about half an hour per chapter, I can read verses here and there without needing to consult a dictionary or interlinear, and for the most part I could give basic dictionary definitions for common words. Tbf, I have a bit of an advantage because I come from a background in English literature, I speak French as a second language, and I am familiar with the Tanakh in English, French, and some verses and chapters I have studied in Latin, Hebrew, or Yiddish. But I did not speak any Greek before a year or so ago. Fluency in Greek, either ancient or modern, requires years of consistent study and practice. While not as difficult for a native English speaker to pick up as a language like Mandarin or Arabic, Greek is still *very* challenging for English speakers because it is not rooted in Latin or Germanic - it is Greek. While there is a lot of vocabulary cross-over with English and other European languages, the grammar is very challenging, particularly the sheer amount of conjugation and declension. If you are doing at least 1 hour every single day, I would say from my experience that it takes about a year to have basic competency. I'm not expecting to be fluent or to be able to hold anything beyond basic conversations until I'm 3-4 years in. As far as vocabulary goes, it seems daunting, but you'll quickly pick up on how many of those 5000 words are constructed from the same stems and lemmas. The example I find most useful is στρατός, army. From στρατός, we get στρατηγική, στρατόκρατια, στρατηγός, στρατιώτης... Strategy, Militarism, General, Soldier. It takes a bit of adjustment to figure out how the lemmas and stems connect and affect each other, but if you think about it, in Greek, all five words have the same root, while in English, all five words seem totally unrelated. In terms of speed, afaik, modern Greek is one of the fastest languages on earth, and that is in part because of the regular use of words that are 6-8 syllables long, compared to English, where most words are 3-5 syllables. So even though the average native Greek speaker clocks in around a blistering 9 syllables per second, they're probably only saying 1 or 2 words. Imo, the best way to adapt to this in any language you're learning is to find native-speaking podcasts with transcripts (or audiobooks with a written edition in front of you), slow the speed down to a level you're comfortable with (I think about .75 is a good starting point), and then *read along out loud*, pausing if you fall behind or need to look up an unfamiliar stem. I find this form of practice to be particularly excruciating, and you will *always* feel incompetent, but if you track your progress week to week or month to month, you will see marked improvements. You will very likely *never* be as comfortable, fast, or confident as a native speaker, but that's not the goal; the goal is to be better than you were last week.
Funny, I was just reading an article about some καταστρατηγηθείσα νομοθεσία. Now that's a mouthful 😅 We sure love our big words. They add gravitas.
Well, Greeks have a bit of an advantage over you in reading ancient Greek.