Gracum est, non legitur

one question and one comment:

1. what do you mean by train reading?

2. why do you recommend flash card vocabulary memorization? I personally don’t believe that memorizing vocabulary with flashcards or whatever is a productive and natural way to learn a language. especially surprised because you recommended Athenaze. I started out with this because I had vocabulary tests in school, but I ended up realizing that the vocabulary I learned this way did not ‘exist’ in my mind like the vocabulary I learned from LLPSI and actual text reading. I don’t think that translation or even working with non-target-language materials is an effective way to learn a language post beginner levels, although this is clearly achieved with more difficulty in dead languages than in live ones.

*I started out with vocabulary memorization

sorry for the shitty post-quality. typing this out on my phone

and thank you for the interesting post. I’m a Linguistics undergrad, formerly Literature, but I got sick of the boring, thoughtless pseudo-science it seems to have become in the modern US university. Don’t even get me started on the fucking annoying grad students who only ever talked about Derrida and Foucault, knowing, of course, nothing about them (not that I’m in any way a fan of those writers).

I attend a prestigious East Coast uni yet in one of my classes the professor asked if anybody had read The Iliad and not a single person raised their hand.

I am really only interested in a balance of study and teaching. Study by itself is lonely and wasteful to me, but I do still have an interest in study in-of-itself. All I do these days is study because I have no job and am not a part of any organizations (they’re all SJW trash at my uni) and spending all day in the library learning without having any output to share what I have learned makes me want to put a bullet in my head.

1. ah should have glossed this. You'll be able to read on the metro, without significant outside aid. (Assuming you aren't trying to read Thucydides for the first time, or something equally difficult.

2. Fair criticism. Everyone does learn differently, but I always recommend flashcards to beginners as the quickest way to get the most input the fastest. It's not a natural way to learn a language, but it's a nice crutch for first years. I never make flashcards mandatory for my students, but strongly encourage their use and without fail the flashcard makers perform better in the long run. Now of course, this is likely correlation not causation (they are willing to put in more effort so do better in a classroom environment), but I do pretty firmly believe that active flashcard practice helps. This is why I said:
>Make connections between words, even if they seem stupid. Memorization takes active practice, don't just let the words float in front of you.

In other words, looking at flashcards doesn't help, but imagining them in contexts and connecting them to other Greek / English / Latin words really does.

I hear you; grad students often are fucking nitwits. I've honestly never cared enough about the study of language qua-language to be into linguistics, but I enjoyed studying ancient languages because not only did that get me closer to poetry/lit, but also helped me see the framework of languages through comparison.

As to your last paragraph, I mean, that's why I write. Sure, I've got ~50 rejections from different publishers at this point and no one reads my stuff besides my friends, but creative production has been incredibly fulfilling for me. And if you really need a direct output, that's kind of what relationships are for. You're in an American undergrad institution -- it will literally never be easier to make friends in your life than it is right now. If you are struggling to form meaningful and intimate relationships in your personal life, you've gotta re-evaluate some things.

I agree with you re/ flashcards. I teach Latin/Greek as well. What sort of stuff do you write?

Fiction and poetry, like anyone on Yea Forums, I guess. Short stories are all I've ever submitted though, and, while I get kind rejection letters ("We very much enjoyed reading..."), still nothing published. I've finished drafting two novels since I started grad school, which, honestly, might really be one novel. But I have no idea what the fuck to do with them besides keep revising and writing more stuff, because, if I can't get a story published, who the fuck is going to take a novel?

Amazed to see another classics teacher on Yea Forums. You also a grad student? Private tutor?

>I'd rather translate Petrarch's letters to Cicero on a Saturday and write my own back at them both on Sunday than join the new culturally dead tech aristocracy.
Doing your own thing is an admirable course of action. I'm an English undergrad, but I have mad respect for Classics people just because of that resolve sticking out like a middle finger to a world devoid of any appreciation for culture.

>reading any """""""Greek""""""" from before 620 AD

When you start reading texts, you'll want to use perseus.tufts to move through things quickly. It has a vocab tool, translations on the side, and pretty much the entire canon digitized for free (Latin and Greek). If you just want a dictionary, philolog.us is the best available for free. That might not be for a while, though.

Depends what the novels are about, some people's style suits novels better than short stories and vice versa. What's your specialism, if you don't mind my asking?

>. It's much easier to figure out Homeric/Koine/all the lyric variants of Greek from Attic
Your classics PhD didn't include Ionic or Doric or Linear B, and likely skipped Homer. Koine is clean Attic but telling people they can work out Homeric from Attic is bizarre. Don't overstate your credentials, and if you don't see why you're being misleading, consider getting in contact with those outside your uni because your uni is doing you a disservice.
Starting with Attic is fine, but a PhD who doesn't know Herodotus is Ionic is embarrassing in countries where there are high school ancient Greek exams which demand you know the difference.
Pharr's Homeric Greek
Attic through Xenophon
Plutarch for Koine
Herodotus for Ionic
Lucian for Ionic and Attic style

Pharr's the most modern, but the others are standard for beginners since forever so there are translations and glosses in most European languages. Lucian you should save til last because his imitation of style is something that still causes arguments among scholars (His Syrian Goddess is often argued to be from Herodotus because his Ionic is perfectly in tune with Herodotus, but that just demonstrates how well he read Herodotus)

Mate, I didn't try to list every variant of Greek, just Attic + the two most common + lyric, which is my personal specialty. I wasn't making an exhaustive account. I'm not going to expect someone on a chan to be looking to learn fucking linear b, and we both know very well that you can't read linear b either. Regardless of where you're going, starting with Attic is the best and most common option. Like most any other Greek student, I learned Attic first and was able to easily pick up Homeric reading Homer in undergrad courses. There's a reason the only "start with Homeric" book is Pharr, written literally 99 years ago, in 1920. Pretty much no university teaches that way, and every Homeric commentary I've seen is designed to help students who started with Attic figure out Homeric.

Maybe things are vastly different in whatever country you're from, but I've been through 3 different American universities and am actively involved with classics conferences and I've literally never seen a scholar suggest students start anywhere but Attic.

I don't know where the fuck you're coming from with this shit. You just need to take out anger against boogymen you make up online to feel superior to someone?

>I didn't try to list every variant of Greek, just Attic + the two most common + lyric, which is my personal specialty
Only you didn't specify that as your speciality, but stated classics were and that you teach both Latin and Greek to students. Since only teaching your speciality to students would be undereducating them for secondary education, let alone tertiary or postgrad, I assumed OP might want a warning that is in no way comprehensive for any classics degree. Bringing us to
>I'm not going to expect someone on a chan to be looking to learn fucking linear b, and we both know very well that you can't read linear b either.
I did recommend you reach out to those outside your uni if you thought such a narrow focus was normal for tertiary education. Mycenaean Greek is not that odd of a speciality, especially at PhD levels. Most people recognise your best chance for original research is in linear b, and since you need to create original research to get a PhD of any worth, you get a lot more students who are interested in the untranslated parts of Greek than in the parts you mentioned which have readily available translations and reams of research already written on them.
>Like most any other Greek student, I learned Attic first and was able to easily pick up Homeric reading Homer in undergrad courses. There's a reason the only "start with Homeric" book is Pharr, written literally 99 years ago, in 1920. Pretty much no university teaches that way, and every Homeric commentary I've seen is designed to help students who started with Attic figure out Homeric.
I would seriously re-evaluate your uni's willingness to expose you to Greek scholarship, and your ability to read Homeric if I were you. Pharr is the most accessible way to learn Homeric, and Attic is in many ways more distant from Homeric than any other form of ancient Greek. Telling user to just work it out from Attic is bad advice, and ignores the many phonetic shifts involved. It's like saying once you can read P-Celts you can read Q-Celts. It also ignores Atticised Greek was so notoriously convoluted that Koine in part was created because people who spoke Attic could not read half of what Attic writers were producing. Telling someone you can work out Koine from Attic or vice versa is much more realistic than telling someone you can work out Homeric from Attic. You would have an easier time working out Homeric from Ionic or Doric or even Mycenaean, because even by early Attic there are far more shifts away from Homeric than in the others and that problem only expands as Attic develops and spreads.
Starting with Attic and then moving on to Homeric is older than Pharr's contribution. I find it implausible that this was never raised at any of three different American institutions, because it is especially odd for American institutions to not point out where or why they broke with tradition from the UK and then to revert to the UK system of the late 1800s they'd proved incompetent.

I don't quite understand how to use perseus most effectively..

Since I've been teaching myself ancient greek over the last year, I can tell you what I did and how far I've come.
I used the american version of Athenaze to get going with the italian version. I also skimmed the two supplementary books from vivariumnovum "Ephodion a/b", as well as the two books that are written in ancient greek entirely, the first of which is called "Alexandros to hellenikon paidon". After some mediocre attemps of reading Xenophons Anabasis, Herodots Histories and some Plato, I read through Zuntz's "Griechischer Lehrgang".
Since then I've been many bilingual editions of Herodot, Xenophon, Plato, some Aristotle and Lucian, and am currently reading Arrian's History of Alexanders Anabasis.
Sometimes I can understand much of the original without consulting the translation, sometimes I can barely make it through the text; often I need multiple attempts to even start with a work since - as I found out - it takes some time to get used to the different authors. Plutarch for instance I tried alot, but never seem to get too far without completey loosing any understanding.
I'd like to dive into some poetry, specifically tragedies but I doubt very much I'm there yet.
However difficult it can be at times, it's still alot of fun though.

The Orthodox Greek bible which is written in Koine has everything you need for practice, its extremely well written and because many words in the bible repeat themselves you can practice vocabulary.

I am a modern Greek speaker, and Attic is hard even for me, but Koine flows easily. There seems to be a jump in sentence structure from Attic and Koine that's huge. But once you know how to read Koine, Attic will seem recognizable and not really look so alien.