How hard on a scale of 1-2 is it to learn Ancient or Koine Greek?

How hard on a scale of 1-2 is it to learn Ancient or Koine Greek?

Anyone done it?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/γράφω#Ancient_Greek
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Yes, I am fluent in both.
I'd say 1 if those are your metrics.

outside of a university?

I meant to put "independently" in the OP.

Hard

I would learn Ancient first unless you're very certain you're ONLY going to need Koine, like you're solely interested in the New Testament

The learning curve is mostly high because there is a lot of memorisation, and you have to stick to it and really not slack off in learning all the forms

The grammar itself isn't super complicated or anything if you already know Latin, standard fare aside from the usual quirks and actually kind of easier than Latin in certain ways, but if you don't know anything about grammar you might struggle with learning/memorising all the constructions while also memorising tables and shit

The problem with not having a teacher is you'll have to 1) get over conceptual snags on your own using Google, 2) keep motivated to learn and drill a lot of conjugation, like an amount that will surprise you if you've just come from learning French, and without slacking off, 3) pace yourself without knowing what to prioritise. The last one is important because it can really help to have a teacher in charge who knows when it's a good time to slow down, to cover a chapter especially deeply because it's a nightmare, and to assign side readings that keep your motivation up by showing you that you're actually coming along nicely.

Hansen & Quinn is on libgen if you want to try an intensive course. The first chapter with the accent placement explanations is a pain, and in our class, we were encouraged to temporarily ignore the rules for accents on nouns (which have special rules apart from accents on verbs, and need to be learned as part of the vocab) until later on because it made the first chapter such a pain. If you do that, try getting past the first chapter and going a few chapters past it, and see what kind of work you'll be doing. Then skim to later in the book so you can see that it pretty much goes on like that.

It's an OK language to learn if you're willing to put in the hours and you've already learned Latin. But by yourself there's a high risk of burnout, for the average person.

Here is an example of the morphology, one of the first verbs you will learn:

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/γράφω#Ancient_Greek

Click all the tenses to see how many forms they have

Some of these are not as important, like dual and middle stuff, but you will still have to learn them

Also it's less daunting than it looks because much of it follows certain regularities, and once you memorise a bunch of conjugation, you get lots of little mental tricks for remembering how to conjugate certain regular/obvious tenses.

And I always say: Learn your conjugations 95%, put in the work to be able to know them like the back of your hand, but don't worry about killing yourself for that extra 5% to perfection. If 95% ability requires 95 points of effort, then that extra 5% requires 500 points. When you're reading actual prose, you're always going to be forgetting something here or there, or failing to recognise a form, and then you can look it up. It's necessary to have a very good skill base, the 95%, to be able to do this - because you only want it happening for truly exceptional things, things that give you especial trouble, etc. But you don't have to shoot yourself in the head if you still have moments of
>oh fuck I forget what the second person plural perfect ... is for this verb
It's better to get up to 95% knowledge with some rough edges, start reading real (but easy) Greek, and consult the textbook for stuff you need to review, than it is to spend 5 years on the textbook.

tldr: If you plan to learn Latin and Greek both, I would strongly suggest you do Latin first. But Greek absolutely can be done if you are very dedicated.

>like an amount that will surprise you if you've just come from learning French

lel, that's actually exactly what I've 'finished' doing. A slow process over years, absorbing tv, internet, news, reading books.

The difficulty of it does worry me a bit - I'm more concerned about whatever grammar holes I have rather than the conjugations but that wiki page was pretty scary.

Thanks for the recommendation on the book, I'll check it out. You made it sound rather horrible though. I'd like to find something that's basically a scaled reader and introduces concepts like that. Then make strategic anki decks for accents, etc. and go from there.

And I have no desire for perfection, I'm not in school, I just want to feel the ancient writers intent in a way I feel I'm missing with English.

Why do you feel so strongly about learning Latin first?
And do you like Greek?

Not who you're replying to, but if you're looking for a good graded reader, I recommend the jact reading Greek series.

Greek has been highly rewarding but I've been very dedicated

2, definitely a hard 2

Pretty easy. Just a lot of memorization.

You have to memorize atleast 12 verb endings in about 15 voices (nominative vocative etc...) equalling 180~. Thats not counting the dual voices that arent necessary.
Then you need 3 declinations for each of those 15 voices and learn some irrehular verbs as well, which arent many.

Id say in 4 months putting 2 hrs a day you could make it to a solid basic understanding thatll let u translate.

As for quickly reading and understanding itd prolly take you atleast a year but prolly more.

I got hit by a piece of rubble at a construction site and came to knowing Koine Greek

it was pretty hard, though

No worries. The grammar really isn't too bad. If you can understand the "logic" of French tenses or the various uses of the French subjunctive, you're fine. Latin and Greek have some more rigid constructions, and you're often taught them AS rigid constructions, but they're pretty intuitive. Especially if you already know another Romance language. The worst shit is just constructions that seem arbitrary and take getting used to, but nothing conceptually difficult.

>You made it sound rather horrible though.
It can be but it's also a lot of fun in a way. It's hard to find the right pitch in depicting how hard it is. It's a mixture of tedium and difficulty, and the difficulty can be overblown too.

>Then make strategic anki decks for accents, etc. and go from there.
>I have no desire for perfection
These sorts of things can work, if you use them as a supplement. But I'd try to unlearn your understanding of modern language-learning, stuff like Memrise and Duolingo, if you're going to tackle a classical language. Approaching it haphazardly or doing a vocab-first method of just trying to "get the gist" when reading is just going to frustrate you. It's morphologically complex enough that too much of the meaning will be bound up in minor inflection changes and prepositional constructions. You really won't be able to read it worth shit unless you learn the grammar and conjugation step-by-step, so you can dissect a sentence and figure out what's going on.

Hansen & Quinn is a graded reader designed for grad students who need to get the language fast (but painfully). The other guy recommended JACT, which is good too. Just make sure you get the new edition, which might not be pirateable easily since it's like 3-4 books used in conjunction. JACT 2e is softer and hand-holdier than H&Q, but that can be a really good thing. I kinda prefer it, especially for self-teaching. H&Q assumes a teacher a lot more, but you can still bootcamp yourself with it if you're gung-ho, especially if you've already learned Latin.

I just recommend Latin because it's like Easier Greek. It's a lot less top-heavy with memorising conjugations, so you can get into reading more quickly, which makes pacing and motivation ten times easier. You will get past the hump of "am I even making progress?" in Latin a lot quicker. And so much of what you learn will transfer over almost identically. Even chunks of the conjugation are similar to Latin (in a fuzzy way, but one that helped me when memorising it). Ultimately, I think there are few people out there who have Attic Greek but no Latin. If you care enough about Antiquity to read Greek, you probably care enough to read Latin too.

>I just want to feel the ancient writers intent in a way I feel I'm missing with English.
>Greek
Honestly, this may sound counterintuitive, but Greek can be a really bad investment for this. The corpus of major Greek authors isn't that big. It seems big, but again, if you're the kind of person who wants to learn Ancient Greek, you're probably going to read all of it in English by the time you're done learning the language anyway. You could probably rattle off all the truly major Attic and Koine authors in 30 seconds, and on top of that, they're all really well-translated because of how enormous and venerable the scholarship is, unless you have very particular reasons like doing esoteric Heideggerian readings of Aristotle.

I had a Classics TA once who told me that Latin is cool, and you can do it as a side-gig even if you aren't a classicist, but that Greek is a waste of time unless you have specific reasons or fairly deep interests in it. For the amount of time you put into learning Greek, you could learn German and maybe half of another language, and have access to a lot more material that is a lot more dubiously translated.

Another problem with Greek is that if you don't use it you will lose it. If you learn the language thinking you're gonna have this whole world of Greek literature to enjoy, and then realise you really only wanted to read a few major things, that'd suck, because you won't be able to exercise it and it will start to fade quickly. Especially since those things will probably require another year of being shitty at translating so you can get up to the level of reading them with any pleasantness anyway. All that just for Plato.

I like Greek but I need it for specific reasons and I'm an autistic faggot. On that note, sorry for the longposting. Autism.

Koine Greek was a major language of learning for not far off a thousand years with substantial amounts of texts being only partially (if even that) or very dryly translated (because it's only meant for academics). If you are the kind of person who is nerdy enough to want to learn Koine Greek there is going to be an endless series of things for you to read.

Plenty of things to read
if you're into sermons.

You, OP, may or may not be able to learn the externals of the language--the grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and so on--but your heart is definitely not in the right place to deal with what the Koine has to say.

Go to bed, Phil.

>666
>satan trips defends the kerygma
>mfw rare something new under the sun appeared

Moretz is built like a spartan

She's cute.

...

lmao its gondola

Whenever someone mentions Greek people talk grammar but the hardest part of Greek is vocabulary. Almost none of the words look familiar and you just have to brute-force your way through a few thousand words to get anywhere near reading comfortably. And every time you start a new author you'll have to memorize at least a thousand or two new words that show up in that author regularly but not in things you have read in the past.

The grammar looks really complicated but in fact it is fairly regular, less so than Latin but really not too bad. You can learn most of the morphology in a week or two if you go hard. Copy the tables again and again, run through them in your mind during down-times throughout the day, etc. And the syntax, while it would be somewhat tricky for someone with no experience with an inflected language, is really a lot more manageable than Latin. Greek prose syntax is almost like German, Latin is like Russian. The extra case + no article makes a big difference.

Like everyone else in the thread said Greek is more tedious than truly hard. If you can grit your teeth through the first few months of memorization and drilling your Greek will only get better and better over time.

On a scale of 1 to 2?

refrigerator

...

1

There's no point in learning Latin or Greek desu, everything of value has been translated into English.

are these shopped?

just roids