Hello! I'm going to be reviewing Ancient Greek and writing to others who are learning it with a view to teaching. Before I get into very much content I wanted to make some notes about the way that I'm studying Greek this time.
My approach is going to be two-fold. A pincer movement! First, for a conventional, systematic study of Greek grammar, I will be using a big fat book called Greek: An Intensive Course by Hardy Hansen and Gerald Quinn. It's an excellent and straightforward textbook. It is somewhat lacking in ANSWERS which can be awfully frustrating. Good thing for you that some enterprising psyche has created an online answer key. (I haven't looked through all of them but there seem to be entries for every chapter.) An Orthodox internet acquaintance of mine was at one time working on an answer key with notes for those less than pellucid passages of the textbook. (He asks that you throw him a few bucks in the tip jar and I encourage you to do the same if you use his work.)
I know that with a very active baby and another bun in the oven, I'm going to be working through this sucker pretty slowly. I started last week on accents and I'm still not done! But that does not bother me this time because of the second main element of my approach.
Second side of the pincer: Every morning my husband reads a chapter of the Old Testament to our squirmy baby and me, and then we look at the Septuagint Greek for that chapter and read as much as we can before the baby starts yodeling at us. I stumble through what I can based on the Greek that I remember from college and what I remember of the story, and he helps me with words and forms that I don't know. It's as simple as that. We've only been doing it for a couple of weeks and I can already understand much more than I did at the beginning. Greek words are sticking in my head and I'm thinking about them throughout the day. And I don't feel bad about going slowly through accentuation because I feel like I'm actually learning Greek even though I'm only on page 15. Also, I feel good about being thorough this time with accentuation because it is so freaking important and I know it will pay off later. (I didn't know this the first time I studied Greek, and though that I could just kind of wing it. Nope!)
I highly recommend doing something like this in your own study of Greek, even if you don't have the benefit of cobwebby old Greek skills and a brilliant husband like I do. The Bible is a good text to start with because the Greek is pretty simple, the vocabulary is limited, and everything is fairly concrete. I wouldn't recommend doing it with Plato or something that is in itself hard to understand (although you'll get there eventually!) Read one paragraph in English, cover it up, and read through the same paragraph in Greek. Look at the English after you've made your bravest attempt to figure it all out. Do as much as you want to do before you get tired. Just do at least a little bit every day.
You won't understand much at first, but after just a few days of doing this, you'll start to figure things out. Luckily the Bible repeats a lot of phrases over and over again, and you'll just start to recognize them. (For example, you'll see a lot of "And he spoke to him, saying...") You can also notice cognates and derivatives and make likely guesses about what they mean. And as you continue studying in the boring textbook, you'll find that the abstract concepts will find places in your mind a little more easily, because you'll be encountering them, in real, beautiful, meaningful sentences.
I think this is a great way to proceed with students as well. Don't tell my former students that I admitted this, but the first few months of Greek can be incredibly frustrating and mind-numbingly boring for students who aren't already interested in it. It's mostly memorizing rules with no experience of what they're actually for. Sure, you might get to translate sentences like "Homer leads the children into the island" but the initial thrill of understanding such a statement is limited. So teachers can be tempted to rush through the basics to get to something more interesting, which can really cause problems later on.
So if I were teaching Greek, I'd commit to going VERY slowly through the alphabet, accentuation, and making sure my students understood the concepts of noun gender, number and case. This part of class would be terribly dull and thorough. I would take a No Child Left Behind attitude here (within reason.) But the rest of the class time would be spent simply reading passages in Greek aloud. We would practice pronunciation, point out the forms we're learning as we encounter them in the wild, start to amass a vocabulary, and the students would get a feel for translation.
As we progress through the grammar forms, this part of class is going to be more and more fun, as the students recognize more and more of what they're learning. With this approach, I think you'll have more students reaching sooner that crucial moment when they realize "By Zeus, I'm reading and understanding something that was written before Christ was born!" And that will be awesome.
