About the Barbarian's Guide to Greek

The blog begins because I want to make a thorough attempt at learning Attic/Koine Greek, and I would like to give it rather better than the old college try.

I first studied Ancient Greek at St. John's College at the tender age of 18, and hardly knew which way was up. Like most of my peers I splashed about, then tread water, and finally was beginning to make stronger and surer strokes, when we were finished with our three semesters of Plato, Sappho, Homer and the Bible, and quit Greek for the comfortingly solid ground of English poetry.

I kept thinking about Greek a lot because just as we finished studying it, I was baptised into the Orthodox Church. Most of Orthodoxy's seminal texts are written in Greek, so the language is all over the place: icons, names of things, theological concepts, parts of the liturgy, music. It greatly behooves the newly illumined Orthodox Christian to have a basic familiarity with Greek. (I do not believe it is by any means necessary, but it makes the transition a lot more fun.)

Then after I graduated I married another Orthodox Johnnie who was a great big nerd and spent his free time keeping up his Greek so that he could read Aristotle and Plato outside of class. Yoked to such an achiever, I have spent much of my marriage feeling grossly irresponsible for squandering my hard earned Greek skills.

Next, we were brought onto the faculty of a classical Orthodox school. I taught middle school Latin for two years. Through the process of picking up Latin from scratch on my own, and then teaching it to students, I learned a lot about learning languages.

I've made a couple attempts at picking up Greek again, but now I think I'm really ready. To keep myself accountable, I decided to start this blog. I'm going to write in it as if I'm teaching someone else how to learn Greek. My ultimate goal is to prepare materials for teachers in Orthodox schools or homeschools to teach New Testament Greek. There are textbooks available, but certain supplementary materials are lacking.

I will be studying the extremely thorough Hansen and Quinn Intensive Greek course. I'm not going to rewrite the book, but I'll give notes and commentary as I go through it.

The complication is that I have a baby, and another one on the way. So if you're following along at home, I hope you have lots of other things to occupy you as you wait for posts to dribble out!