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I'm taking Elementary Greek I (I will have to take 2 more Greek classes after that for my major)during this next fall semester. I was just wondering if anyone here has taken it- I imagine that at least a couple of you had.
And if you have- I'd like to hear how it was for you. I took three years of Latin in high school, so I'm totally completely unfamiliar with the learning of a dead language concept, but still it's the class that I am having the most trepidation for, and simultaneously one of the ones I'm most looking forward to taking.
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I took it, and loved it. Well, I loved the first semester. The second semeste I loathed, but that's due to a combination of having a teacher poorly suited to teaching beginning students and my being too immature to attend class as regularly as might have been wise. My third semester of it kind of sucked, because I hadn't learned a whole lot my second semester. My fourth semester, though, was great. I did almost nothing, that semester, other than study Greek, eat, and sleep (a little). I probably spent an average of eight hours a day studying Greek, and succeeded in teaching myself everything that I'd missed second semester and been too confused to really pick up third semester.
That probably doesn't do you a whole lot of good, though.
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That's cool. I'll have to take Greek I and II plus New Testament Greek Exegesis, and then I'll have to also take Hebrew I and II (starting that next year though). I'm a Biblical Studies major (one of them anyways). I have Greek I and Basic Research and Stat for Psych 4 days a week next semester. Woohoo!
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I took a little Greek after I took a 300 level ancient history class a few years ago but, I didn't have the time for it and dropped it. I pretty much learned the alphabet and then stopped, but I do want to continue one day. It was fun though short lived.
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I enjoyed Greek. I took it after I had done some 300-level Latin classes, and I thought Latin was a good starting point--Greek is a little harder, to my mind. Fun, though!
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One of the Latin teachers that taught at my high school said he thought Greek was easier than Latin, once you get past the barrier of the alphabet.
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quote:Originally posted by Shawshank: One of the Latin teachers that taught at my high school said he thought Greek was easier than Latin, once you get past the barrier of the alphabet.
To a man, my buddies in the Classics department agreed that Ancient Greek was the language of the Devil himself (all of them accomplished Latinists).
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Shawshank, sounds like you are taking koiné Greek, the Greek of the New Testament. Ancient Greek, the Greek of the Greek classics, is more structured. By the time of the New Testament, several noun cases had been combined, and many standards of grammar had been relaxed. The difference was similar to the old English of the King James Version of the Bible compared to modern English, which of course is more degenerate. "Thou," "thee," "you," and "ye" have become just "you."
The second semester of Greek is usually harder because then you get into studying the verb system, and the word endings are so similar for verbs (in all their tenses), adverbs, and gerunds. The Greek verb system was far more sophisticated than the English verb system, and included tenses we do not even have in English.
The first day of Greek class, my teacher declared with mock severity, "If anyone in this class says 'It's Greek to me,' he automatically flunks!"
The first big hurdle, of course, is learning the alphabet. There are only 22 letters, compared to the 26 in the English alphabet, but many of the capital letters are very different from the lowercase forms.
It is surprising, though, how many Greek words we find are the foundation for words in the English language. For example, akou-o (I hear) may sound strange, until you think of the English word, acoustics. And grapha-o (I write) may sound strange until you think of graphics. You may have to think a little to see the connection between lithos (stone) and lithography--which originated as writing with stones (using engraved stones as stamps). I took an I.Q. test once that asked: "Why would an anthropophagite welcome a visit from an anthropologist?" The question is easy to anyone who knows a little Greek. "Anthropos" is Greek for man, "ologist" is one who seeks the word of, or knowledge, and "phagite" is a form of "phaga-o," which means "I eat." So the question was really "Why would a cannibal welcome a visit from a scientist who studies man?"
Someone claimed that up to one-third of English comes from Greek or Latin roots. Then you add the fact that English is a trainwreck between Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, and you see why English is such a difficult language to learn. Ancient and Biblical Greek, by way of contrast, were much more regular, with rules of grammar that had far fewer exceptions.
My denomination (Seventh-day Adventist) requires all its ministers to learn Biblical Greek and Hebrew before they can be given ministerial credentials. Aramaic, the third Biblical language (used in the middle portion of the book of Daniel) is only an elective, not a requirement. Admittedly, ministers seldom actually use any of these. It's really just a prestige thing.
I find that with Analytical Concordances available, and a multitude of different translations to compare, you can pretty much sort out any issues concerning the meaning of the original languages in any given passage, without actually having to know them.
[ June 13, 2008, 10:11 AM: Message edited by: Ron Lambert ]
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quote:Originally posted by Shawshank: One of the Latin teachers that taught at my high school said he thought Greek was easier than Latin, once you get past the barrier of the alphabet.
I have never heard that opinion expressed by anyone who is good with both languages.
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quote:Originally posted by Carrie: I'm still in Greek.
It's been six years, and I'm still going strong.
Very cool. I've forgotten virtually everything of it that I learned. Even a few years ago I'd have been able to hobble through a text if I were armed with Smyth and a dictionary, but these days I think I'd be at sea even with those on hand.
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I'm taking Ancient Greek 101 right now. I love it - it is easier than Latin, although that might be because I've had Latin already.
My favorite part is my professor. She looks and sounds like Cate Blanchett in the latest Indiana Jones movie. She's a very good teacher - very patient, thorough, open to questions, uses a variety of techniques, which is good because each class is 3.5 hours long. She'll go through the vocabulary and help us think of English cognates to remember them. She occasionally overestimates our vocabulary, which leads to a Mexican standoff where she refuses to move on until we figure out what English word came from the new Greek word. From last night:
"Theros. Is a monster, a beast. What is the word in English?" We gave her blank looks. She mouths something with about five syllables. We give her more puzzled looks. I can usually figure it out - I came up with tautology and hegemon last week - but I'm drawing a blank. She sighs heavily and writes it on the board: theriomorphic. Oh! Of course! Why didn't I think of that instantly!
During a casual part of class she spoke of a friend of hers who found a classics job somewhere else in the United States. He was glad because it is very difficult to get classics jobs. This one was teaching Latin and Greek to inmates in a prison. In telling the story, she downright indignant. "You know what I had to do in order to study classics?! Someday I will tell you. And prisoners get to learn it!" It was very cute. And made me very curious - she's definitely Russian, and she's at least 50 years old, so she got her education when it was still the Soviet Union. I can't wait to hear her story.
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Noemon, my Greek teacher told about being at a meeting where an elderly minister near retirement came over to him, looked over his shoulder at a Greek text he was reading, and said, "That word--kai--that means 'and,' doesn't it?" So much for five semesters of Greek, after 40 years of ministry! (Kai is usually one of the first words you learn.)
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: I'm taking Ancient Greek 101 right now. I love it - it is easier than Latin, although that might be because I've had Latin already.
That could be, kat. I know that with my first Greek class, though, the textbook was designed to shield us to a great extent from all of the quirks that made Greek challenging when I got deeper into it.
I think that I'd enjoy your teacher quite a bit, but the way; she sounds great. When you find out her backstory, let us know.
Ron, yep. At this point, I can still tell you that "Dikaiopolos is an Athenian" to beat the band (that was the first sentence of Greek in my textbook, and it stuck for some reason), conjugate "to be" in the the present tense, and I could probably tell you the case of a given noun, as long as it wasn't terribly tricky, but give me another two and a half decades and I don't expect to even be able to do that stuff.
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With Greek, there are six principal parts instead four and more important irregular verbs, not to mention articles, accents, and fewer cognates with modern English. The great perk for Greek over Latin, for me, is the quality of material in Greek. Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristotle, New Testament, and Homer. Latin has Augustine, but the list gets thinner unless you are a scientist. There is just so much depth and wisdom in there. I also found Greek a more precise language, maybe because of the extra principal parts and the definite article.
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quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: With Greek, there are six principal parts instead four and more important irregular verbs, not to mention articles, accents, and fewer cognates with modern English. The great perk for Greek over Latin, for me, is the quality of material in Greek. Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristotle, New Testament, and Homer.
And Euripides, and the Odes of Pindar, and Hesiod, and Thucydides (holy crap, Thucydides alone would be worth learning the language for), and Herodotus, and Heraclitus...the list just goes on and on.
To be fair, though, Latin is a lot richer than you're giving it credit for when it comes to Stuff Worth Reading.
This thread is making me want to teach myself Greek again.
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