People want to learn Greek for many different reasons.This is fine, and nothing in AGE will put such students at a disadvantage, but AGE is designed from its foundations for students of the 21st century who have only English as a base language. As a result, students with an educational background that accords with 19th-century approaches (e.g., some students of Latin) have tended to have the most success when learning Greek in a traditional environment. Traditional instruction in Greek has changed very little since the mid-19th century. Users of AGE live in the 21st century.
Throughout history, millions of people have successfully learned Greek as an additional language. Greek should not be ridiculously hard to learn.Everything in this digital package, therefore, is designed to facilitate learning Greek. No other language is quite like Greek, so learning Greek is not quite like learning any other language.HOW DOES ANCIENT GREEK for EVERYONE WORK?Ī team of teachers and scholars has devised Ancient Greek for Everyone ( AGE) on some core principles: It will be because you know that the sentence is incomprehensible and you want to continue forward to more Greek that you understand. You can struggle with these bits of Greek or you can just move on, as you wish, but it won’t be because you can’t understand Greek. Depending on what you read, some of it will at first appear incomprehensible. You will understand most of it and you will understand more as you read more. This digital package embodies the first part of the mission of Ancient Greek for Everyone, by providing explanation and practice of the core of the ancient Greek language for beginners. (If you are wondering why Greek has been so hard to learn, or if you have tried to learn Greek before and it was frustrating, there is an appendix to this introduction that explains why. After learning the core, readers of Greek best learn more Greek by reading more Greek.Learning the core of Greek should be straightforward for beginners.The good news is that, despite its reputation, a lot of Greek is blindingly simple. This fact leads to the mission statement of Ancient Greek for Everyone: Have you understood everything you have ever read in English? Some passages in every language are unintelligible to the average native speaker. This does not mean, however, that Greek is fundamentally impenetrable.
Yet even they encountered Greek that was unintelligible to them. These Greeks knew the language perfectly well, and in some cases they were themselves experts in the Greek language. The comic playwright Aristophanes, for example, makes jokes about not being able to understand Aeschylus, and the scholar Dionysius of Halicarnassus confesses that sometimes he cannot figure out what Thucydides means. Even some ancient Greeks admitted that they did not understand all that they were reading.
But this is not because you or anyone else cannot learn Greek. It is true that some things written in Greek, including occasional passages of famed authors, are nearly incomprehensible. It means that Greek is an impenetrable mystery language that no one understands. You learn ways to make it better (or hope that it does not end badly…).īut of course, that is not what “It’s all Greek to me” means to most people. (This does not mean that everything you see is positive, by the way: half of the time the lesson you learn from the Greeks is “Don’t do that! It ends badly!”). When you study Greek, this saying means that you have come to appreciate the power and legacy of the Greek language, and the people who spoke and wrote in this language. (You are hereby forgiven if you have already said this to someone else who studies Greek.) If you have not, once you start studying Greek, you can be sure someone will say it to you.
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