How into Ancient Greek?

there's a shitty online answer key made by some Korean kid or something for the most difficult section of exercises in H and Q

There ARE answer keys included in H and Q for the practice exams

Well, regardless I think that if you're learning a language you need some sort of feedback. Ideally that would be from a teacher but if that isn't possible you need to at least be able to make sure you're on the right track by checking your answers. OP should check what's available for H&Q and see if it's sufficient for him.

You guys got any recommendations for a Latin textbook? My course uses An Introductory Latin Course for University Students by C. De Heer (I'm in Australia lol). And recommends English Grammar for Students of Latin by Goldman. Are these good?

Moreland and Fleischer has the same approach as H and Q (in face H and Q was inspired by Moreland and Fleischer's structure)

so if you do end up going for H and Q, I would pick up Moreland and Fleischer

in fact*

How difficult is Plutarch's Greek in his Parallel Lives? Does it lean more towards Xenophon or to Thucydides in term of difficulty?

No. If you want to translate go for Plato's Euthyphro or Ion. Plato has perfect Greek and the Ion and the Euthyprho should not be too complex to translate.
Aristotle, on the other hand, is mostly a bad writer - with the exception of a few works.

Moreland and Fleischer also does not have an official answer key. There's a partial one online that someone made but that's it.

I recommend using a better method and trying Orberg. The idea from the Dowling Method to memorize the inflections beforehand would probably make things easier. If there were something like that available for Greek I would suggest it as well (there is, but only in Italian).

It's easier than either. Koine is Attic based, but much simpler and Plutarch's considered the basic standard of competence. A lot of his work he designed to be read by people learning basic Greek.

Here's the second edition for H and Q

gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=hansen & quinn&lg_topic=libgen&open=0&view=simple&res=25&phrase=0&column=def

Agreed,
Start with Ion or that Lysias speech that was posted earlier

Don't read side by side translations and original texts such as loebs if you plan on seriously pursuing the study of the language. The habit of this kind of reading is harmful to the learning process.

These textbooks have side-by-side translations though. I can just skip the English pages anyway, which I would want to cite for my Aesthetics course because I won't be able to learn Ancient Greek that well, in all honesty.

ancient greek makes no fucking sense whatsoever
you constantly have to fill gaps

I wouldn't suggest learning Greek unless you're pursuing education which requires it or you have some serious investment in learning it (e.g. religious use). It's a very difficult language and most things, especially classics, are translated. Latin is easier, there are better learning methods available, and would get more practical benefit from it.

I would advise learning Latin first, learning a lot of classical history, and generally increasing your knowledge of philosophy and history to see if you REALLY want to learn Greek. Learning Greek is only worth it for a select few people, e.g., people who desperately want to read a specific kind of philosophy as central to the Western tradition, and read it in a very specific way for very specific reasons.

Other than things like that, Greek has a surprisingly limited corpus and you will spend 2 years agonizing over learning it, even if you actually do it properly, only to find there isn't much you really WANT to read. Especially since for the first five years of reading, your own personal translation is going to be slower, shittier, and uglier than just reading high quality translations (which are all magisterial as fuck by this point since Greek is such a limited corpus, with very few exceptions. There are like 900 books on EVERY PLATO DIALOGUE of just classical scholars arguing over whether a theta was a manuscript error and how it subtly changes one word without even altering the meaning much.)

Learn Latin first to see if you like it. If you're the kind of very specifi cperson who should learn Greek, you're 99% likely to be the kind of person who should learn Latin, in which case you lose nothing and gain everything by learning it first, since it will make learning Greek 10x easier.

I'm part Greek and want to be able to go to Greece or talk to my granddad in it. I understand it's different to Modern Greek, but it wouldn't hurt to learn Attic Greek. I also study philosophy, so thought it'd be good to read the Socratics on my own and not depend on translators.

It's funny, one of the first things my Greek teacher said to us, on the first day, was: "If you are a modern Greek, or you speak modern Greek for some other reason, this course will be twice as hard for you because you will have to work backward and suspend that knowledge while learning Attic." Apparently it's just similar enough to be a constant temptation to think under its logic, but not similar enough to be helpful at all.

If you're interested in reading the Greeks on their own terms, and learning Attic to do it, you should become familiar with Heidegger ASAP. Practically his whole philosophy is based on going back to the Greeks (and others) and seeing how subsequent thought is grounded in interpretations/mis-interpretations of their trailblazing, on a level much more primordial than I am making it sound here. If learning Attic is 500 points of time/difficulty, and will give you 500 points of insight into the Greeks "in their own words," Heidegger is 50 points of time/difficulty to understand, for 1000 points of insight payoff. Especially if you actually KNOW Attic and can follow the ground cleared by him for understanding. It will also increase your enthusiasm a hundredfold for sticking with Attic and really learning it - that's what I was alluding to in my first post.

Good luck also, it's fun. Don't underestimate the power of rote - do paradigms until your brain idles in Greek verb tables.