Learning Ancient Greek: What to Expect After 1 Year Self-Taught
Learning something on your own is a lot like beating your head against a cinderblock. It’s hard to understand how you’re doing beyond “this doesn’t hurt as much as before.” What’s often the most difficult is setting realistic expectations: after all, you don’t have a teacher to tell you if you’re swimming, sinking, or hijacking a jetski.
I started learning Ancient Greek (more specifically, Attic Greek — the language of classical Athens) in August of 2019. I called this “What to Expect After 1 Year Self-Taught,” but your mileage may vary. The time you’re able to dedicate each day, your experience learning other languages (particularly inflected languages), and your propensity for natural language are all variables that could make your experience different.
But still: some mileage marker is better than no mileage marker, even if it’s actually in kilometres. And that’s what I hope to provide here. I’ll also be sharing the places I screwed up, so you don’t have to.
And I’ll tell you this right now: I just finished Plato’s Republic, Book I, in the original Attic. So if you think you’ll need to dedicate years and years before you’re able to pick up a Plato, Democritus, or Herodotus… think again.
The Time Investment:
August 2019 — February 2020: 13–15 hours a week (2–2.5 hours a day Mon-Sat, 1 hour Sun)
February — Present: 9–10 hours a week (1–1.5 hours a day Mon-Fri, 2 hours Sat-Sun)
The Curriculum:
- Reading Greek textbook series
- Plato’s Apology: A Commentary (Paul Allen Miller)
- Plato’s Republic, Book I: Greek Text and Facing Vocabulary (Geoffrey Steadman)
Reading Greek Textbook Series
Includes: Reading Greek: Grammar & Exercises; Reading Greek: Text & Vocabulary; Reading Greek: An Independent Study Guide; Speaking Greek 2 Audio CD set
I really liked this textbook series. Grammar & Exercises is what it sounds like: individual lessons for specific areas of Greek grammar, and exercises. Each section has a corresponding section in the Text & Vocabulary book. Usually these are edited versions of original Greek texts designed to showcase what you’ll learn in that section of the Grammar book. I believe this is fairly typical in foreign language study.
The Independent Study Guide, in my opinion, sets this series apart from others. It’s additional commentary on the contents of the Text & Vocabulary book for people who don’t have a professor to explain places where you’re likely to trip up. I bought this as the Kindle version so I could have it open on my phone alongside the textbook.
The Audio CDs are a damn ripoff. They’re really, really important, since they teach you how to pronounce and subvocalize what you’re reading (also, they are pretty hilarious — it sounds like they got British grad students to read through the lessons — which gives a very Monty-Python-in-Athens vibe)… but you can only buy them as CDs… for $35! I don’t even own a CD player, so I needed to use a computer at a local library to rip them to my Google Drive.
Also: make sure you get the Second Edition. The First Edition assumes that you know Latin.
My Learning Process for Reading Greek
Grammar & Exercises
- I wrote and copied each Grammar lesson into a separate, 5-section notebook. I dedicated each section of the notebook to a different grammar area: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, and Other: Adverbs, Prepositions, etc. This made referencing things I forgot much easier, and (probably) helped with memorization.
- I did every single exercise.
- What I would do differently: After finishing the textbook, read the Reference Grammar and Language Survey sections at the back of the book. These are incredibly useful, and provide a ton of context for the sorts of things that might trip you up in original texts.
Text & Vocabulary
- I turned any word I didn’t know into a flashcard.
- I tried to dedicate 15–30 minutes to vocabulary drills each day.
- What I would do differently: For far, far too long I only drilled Greek->English. English->Greek is harder, but it really helps to establish the two-way connection between words.
Time Spent
In my experience, the time estimates at the beginning of each major section of the book are pretty accurate if you can dedicate 2 hours a day. I got through the entire series in around 5 months, which matches up nicely to a single university level of Greek. At this point I’d guess that you’re about at the intermediate level. Everything after this involves reading original texts. (Yay!)
Plato’s Apology of Socrates: A Commentary
I learned about this book from the same place as the Reading Greek series: this article on Five Books. I’m not going to mince words: this was a mistake.
As a commentary, the book is excellent. There’s clearly a lot of care taken to identify historical circumstances and analogues to other texts that a student might miss. Unfortunately, it was too advanced for where I was after finishing Reading Greek, and skipped over a lot of grammar and vocabulary that I hadn’t picked up yet (there is some grammatical commentary, but it is more geared for an advanced level). I spent a lot of time banging my head against the wall with this one.
My Learning Process for Plato’s Apology
- Same as the Text & Vocabulary book. Flashcards for everything I didn’t know and daily drilling.
- What I would do differently: get the Steadman version (see below)
- What I would do differently: reread paragraphs after reading them for the first time; and at the beginning of each reading session reread what I read in the last (this has been incredibly helpful for comprehension in Plato’s Republic)
Time Spent
It took me ~3 months to get through this.
Plato’s Republic, Book I: Greek Text and Facing Vocabulary (Geoffrey Steadman)
I wish I learned about Geoffrey Steadman’s work earlier. He also just published his own intermediate reader for Plato’s Apology, which I’d recommend over the previous commentary. Professor Steadman offers a ton of Ancient Greek & Latin works with the original text on one page, and more in-depth, intermediate commentary and vocabulary on the facing page. Even better, all words used over a certain frequency — “Core Vocabulary” — can be found in the back of the book, so you can check your current knowledge against ~80% of the text. Even better better, all his stuff can be downloaded as a pdf for free. (I bought the printed version, though).
Plato’s Republic, Book I also has one of the most delightful(?) characters in world literature. Which, in my mind, puts this one above Steadman’s other offerings of near-equal difficulty, like Plato’s Crito.
My Learning Process for Plato’s Republic, Book I
- Same as the Text & Vocabulary book. Flashcards for everything I didn’t know and daily drilling. I turned every word, and all the verb forms I didn’t recognize immediately, in the Core Vocabulary into a flashcard before I started.
Time Spent
Like with Plato’s Apology, it took me ~3 months to get through this. I finished it almost exactly a year after I started learning Ancient Greek.
My Milestones (for reference)
Month 1: The biggest hurdle in Month 1 was getting used to the alphabet. To accustom myself to Greek letters more quickly, I started writing my to-do lists at work in Greek letters (still in English though).
Month 2: This was the month when Reading Greek started presenting edited versions of original Greek texts, like passages from Aristophanes — which is a big motivator.
Month 3: This was the last month I had any slip-ups with particular Greek letters (like reading “nu” as an English “v” or “gamma” as an English “y”).
Month 4: About halfway through the textbook. I recommend learning the mi-verbs and optative forms as well as you can here: they won’t go away.
Month 5: When completely unabridged passages are introduced. Some of the excerpts from Athenian trials are pretty hilarious: most involve two dudes going to and from each others’ houses and stealing their stuff.
Month 6: This is around when I finished the Reading Greek series, and started Plato’s Apology. If I were to do this again, I’d still read Plato’s Apology here, but use the Steadman version instead.
Month 7: Beating my head against the Apology. (See “What I’d Do Differently” in the Apology section above). Regularly referenced an official translation.
Month 8: Same as Month 7.
Month 9: Finished the Apology. I know I recommended against using the version I read, but I still think this is one of the best complete texts to start with.
Month 10: Started Plato’s Republic, Book I.
Month 11: Halfway through Plato’s Republic, Book I. This one went really well: there were only 3–4 places where I needed to reference an official translation. Each page of original Greek (Burnet’s Oxford Classical Text) took me between 20–40 minutes to read (heavily contingent on if a particular sentence construction tripped me up).
Month 12: Finished Plato’s Republic, Book I. Started re-reading it again.
What’s next?
After finishing my re-read of Plato’s Republic, Book I, I’m diving into Steadman’s version of Plato’s Symposium. I think I might hire an Ancient Greek tutor to answer some grammatical questions that keep coming up in my reading. Beyond that, I have no idea! I’m thinking either Aristophanes or banging my head against Euripides (for either of those, I think I will definitely need a tutor… Greek poetry is hard).
Hopefully this helps if you are thinking of auto-didacting your way through Ancient Greek! I think that the alphabet is a turn-off for a lot of folks, but you’ll get used to it in a week, and never have a problem with it again after Month 3.
