A Greek Sentence

I associate Christmas with quietly reading classic books in front of a decorated tree—probably because I’ve always liked old traditions from around the world, and used to carry a translation or two home with me from college when visiting family over break.

The difference is that these days I’m trying to read originals, instead of translations. Today I relaxed in the glow of the lights and took a stab at the first sentence of Anabasis, the famous adventure journal that Socrates’ friend Xenophon wrote about his campaigns in Achaemenid Persia.

My holiday tradition.

I’m a beginner in Greek, so this book is far above my level. But dipping my toe into the deep end with a real book now and then is exciting, and Xenophon (so I’m told) is known for being a relatively easy entry point to reading Greek in the original.

The Sentence

Reading above your level is slow going, to put it mildly—but any conquest is satisfying! Today I chewed my way through just the opening:

Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνονται παῖδες δύο, πρεσβύτερος μὲν Ἀρταχέρχης, νεώτερος δὲ Κῦρος· ἐπεὶ δὲ ἠσθένει Δαρεῖος καὶ ὑπώπτευε τελευτὴν τοῦ βίου, ἐβούλετο τὼ παῖδε ἀμφοτέρω παρεῖναι.

My Loeb edition translates this like so:

Darius and Parysatis had two sons born to them, of whom the elder was Artaxerxes and the younger Cyrus. Now when Darius lay sick and suspected that the end of his life was near, he wished to have both his sons with him.

Mastering the Sentence with Cards

This sentence is hard. This is the first time I’ve seen a dual form up close, I technically haven’t studied Greek’s past tenses, and while I know some words like νεός (“young”), I’ve never seen their comparative cousins before (νεώτερος, “younger”). Honestly, I didn’t even know for sure that δύο was how you say “two” in Greek. I’m just five lessons into Athenaze, and it hasn’t covered any of this yet!

But as they say, “good things come to those who jump recklessly into the deep end without a life jacket” (or something like that). So as is my custom as an inductive language learner, I’m going to make approximately 17 zillion Anki cards out of this sentence to grab all the new vocab in context and hit the grammar from several angles.

Wiktionary is all I need to verify meanings and inflections, but this is a lot of work. I thought I’d show you just how many cards we end up with from an exercise like this.

Simple audio cards are all I do. No fancy custom Anki note templates for me.

To be clear, all of these are audio cards: I record my own voice (including my best imitation of the Attic pitch accent) on both sides. This makes it easier to get familiar with the meter of the words (tricky ones like Παρυσάτιδος!), and as far as I can tell it dramatically improves my ability to read (by making me better at doing whole-word recognition & pronunciation):

1. δύο ← → two
2. παῖδες δύο ← → two children
3. γίγνονται παῖδες δύο ← → two children are born
4. Δαρείου γίγνονται ← → [they] are born of Darius
5. Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνονται ← → [they] are born of Darius and Parysatis
6. πρέσβυς ← → elderly, aged
7. πρεσβύτερος ← → older
8. πρεσβύτερος μὲν Ἀρταξέρξης ← → the older (on the one hand was) Artaxerxes
9. νέωτερος ← → younger
10. νεώτερος δὲ Κῦρος ← → but the younger (was) Cyrus
11. τὸ σθένος ← → the strength, power
12. ἀσθένης ← → without strength, weak, sickly
13. ἀσθενέω ← → to be weak, without strength, sickly
14. ἐπεὶ δὲ ἠσθένει Δαρεῖος ← → but when Darius was weak
15. ὑποπτεύω ← → I suspect
16. ἡ τελευτή ← → the end
17. ὑπώπτευε τελευτὴν ← → he suspected the end
18. ἡ τελευτή τοῦ βίου ← → the end of his life
19. τὼ παῖδε ← → the (two) boys
20. ἐβούλετο τὼ παῖδε ← → he wanted his (two) boys
21. τὼ παῖδε ἀμφοτέρω ← → both his boys
22. ἐβούλετο τὼ παῖδε παρεῖναι ← → he wanted his (two) sons to be present
23. παρεῖναι ← → to be present

The beauty of all this sweat and tears is that after a few days (9.2 days, to be precise: I’m learning 5 new Greek cards a day right now, and each of these 23 notes has 2 directions, Greek → English and English → Greek), all of these phrases will be securely fixed in my memory.

Next time I return to Xenophon, I’ll be able to read the first sentence easily. That sort of progress may be tiny, but it feels good.

Balancing Rote Memorization

These card’s are a good haul. Solid afternoon’s work. But I wouldn’t want to rely entirely on collecting dragon balls from the wild this way. I’ve written elsewhere about how complex grammar can trip up inductive language learners, even when using spaced repetition.

The last thing I want to do is to rely on rote memorization to learn how to read Xenophon. Eventually it’ll be important for me to get more solid mastery of the difference between aorist and imperfect tenses, etc., so that when I get a conjugation wrong I can be aware of why I got it wrong.

I’ll also want to see some of the words I’ve learned today in more contexts (especially forms I took straight from the dictionary with no examples, like πρέσβυς or ὑποπτεύω) to get more practice with them.

But I don’t mind doing a little rote memorization today to start softening myself up in advance. Today I’ll learn that “I suspect” is ὑποπτεύω, but “he suspected” is “ὑπώπτευε.” I’ll shore up the gaps that explain why it takes that form (i.e. the conjugation pattern that is at work) later as I progress in my beginner’s material and grammar study.