Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

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When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Under 16 years old
5
17%
Between 16 and 18
5
17%
Between 19 and 21
5
17%
Between 22 and 30
5
17%
Between 31 and 50
7
23%
Over 50 years
3
10%
 
Total votes: 30

daivid
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Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by daivid »

It is said that the age you start learning has a big effect on success in study of a language. Hence I am interested in the spread here.
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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by klewlis »

As a child I had a teacher who made us memorize greek and latin roots, and that is what actually spurred my interest. I started studying Koine in college, though I wouldn't say that at any point my studies have been "serious".
First say to yourself what you would be; then do what you need to do. ~Epictetus

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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by epikeia »

Though I took one year of Classical Greek in college many years ago, I regret to say that I wouldn't class it as "serious" study. More like, "exploratory" (I also took a year of Sanskrit, for example.) A demanding teaching career left me little time for challenging outside pursuits. I'm very happy that a few years ago I became semi-retired and can now focus on Greek in my spare time.

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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by jeidsath »

I started last year, a few weeks before my 34th birthday. I hope to post a year's retrospective of my methods and results, sometime in December.

I personally don't feel that I could have managed a language like Greek when I was younger. I am jealous of Epikeia! I wish that I were retired and had more time to spend reading.
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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by Paul Derouda »

I took a false start at 23, which is 10 years ago. I really started a couple of years later, but I wouldn't say my study has been very serious all the time. Certainly it has been more difficult than any modern language I've studied, but it's difficult to assess whether age is part of the problem, because I haven't started any new modern language as an adult. Maybe I should start Italian or Russian to compare, to see just how much easier it is than Greek, and how much more difficult than German, which I started at 13 and still suck at.

My totally subjective opinion is that until about 11, given the right circumstances and motivation, almost everything is possible and easy, and after that, language acquisition is always a serious pain. It can be done, but it requires a lot of work. I have a friend, a native speaker of Russian, who moved to Finland at that age and became a native speaker, just because she had to. I think she has said that her Russian is nowadays actually weaker than her Finnish. And that's not because she's one of those unfortunate polyglots who are not really comfortable in any language – her Finnish is perfect, and not just the accent; she knows and actively uses every small nuance of any word, just like, or better than, the average "real" native.

What I find totally absurd is how late foreign languages are typically started at school. I think the only sensible approach would be to start the first one at the same time as the children learn to read and write, or even before that in Kindergarten. Especially in a country like Finland, where we speak a language nobody really understands. And would you believe that in addition, they force us to study Swedish at a school from 12/13 years on until university – what's more, a marginal dialect only spoken in Finland by 200,000 people, different enough from the one spoken in Sweden so that you (or in this case, I :wink: ) will have difficulties to make yourself understood in Sweden or to understand what other people are saying. Not that I have anything against the Swedish speaking minority in Finland, but I would have rather spent that time with German or something.

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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by Scribo »

I don't know, it's hard for me to delineate a proper start because I already had modern Greek first. I'd say when I got to university since that was serious as in ridiculously hardcore. I still recall the stress of moving from morphosyntactical review to reading to having to actually begin to learn all the tools of philology in my first year. What a rush. So that was "serious" in that it was very hard and took a huge amount of my time.

Anyway I suspect the idea behind the thread is testing the hypothesis that it's better to start this stuff when younger. I think only in the sense that one has more time, and even then that isn't really all that important. The Classical method is actually brilliant for producing a high level of ability in tightly constrained circumstances but it seems to lose it's lustre when the teachers are given more leeway. Either that or, as I suspect, the teachers in senior schools are just awful.

That being said it varies, my partner tells me she has a student (or students?) from outside the Classics caucus (but still humanities) taking Latin with her who are really very good at it. Which makes me envious since out of all my languages, classical and modern, Latin has in many ways been my hardest won. Even now I've no real trouble writing out textual notes or just reading prose but the poetry often makes me pretty angry at how slow it goes.

Incidentally I'm hitting my mid 20's and I'm finding that it's not so much that I'm finding learning languages more difficult - if anything the process is much, much, easier - but that my motivation is shot. I've been through 2/3 Akkadian textbooks and I'm still awful. I grew up obsessed with Egypt and was recently given a Middle Egyptian textbook but in a year I've only managed to do a chapter or three. I'm honestly dumbfounded when I remember the ridiculous vigour with which I attacked Latin, Greek and (to some degree) Sanskrit a few years ago. I think I've hit middle age apathy a bit early.
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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by daivid »

Scribo wrote: Anyway I suspect the idea behind the thread is testing the hypothesis that it's better to start this stuff when younger. I think only in the sense that one has more time, and even then that isn't really all that important.
That was only part of it. It is also that at school and university you tend to only do what you are good at. Partly because exam results are so important but also when you find yourself trailing in a class at school it is a lot more stressful. Post university the only reason to study is because you want to the ability to read ancient Greek. And if things prove harder than you expect while you might choose to cut your losses the thought of all the commitment of time so far going to waste can produced a stubborn determination to persist.

Hence it is not simply that it may be you have less ability to learn a language as you get older. I think it is also that there will be a higher proportion of people who a less able to learn a language who will keep at it even why they aren't doing especially well.

As for me, I began my one language previous to Ancient Greek in my mid forties so the difference between that and starting Ancient Greek in my late fifties is not great. What makes Ancient Greek much harder is that there is not the huge number of easy readers available - that is childrens' books and comic strips which is how I learn't Serbo-Croat.
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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by jaihare »

I started to study Koine (ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος) on my own at 17 years old. That is now about 17 years ago! I took three years of Koine in college and then gave up the language for a long time. About three years ago (I think), I started to learn Attic.

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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by ariphron »

I took a summer course in Attic Greek when I was 22, but dropped out two-thirds of the way through because I found it frustrating and stressful to spend all the time translating. I knew that I wanted to learn to read in the reconstructed pronunciation, but I wasn't equipped to teach myself and the course wasn't going to teach me. I switched and taught myself French instead. A couple years later I came back to Greek and made some progress, but my study techniques still weren't good enough to learn vocabulary thoroughly and read anything substantial. A few years later I started learning Chinese, and it forced me to learn some very disciplined study techniques both to master the writing system and to hear and reproduce the tone distinctions. I don't think anything will be hard to learn after Chinese. Coming back to Greek in the past two years, I've found it fun and easy, a good diversion from more difficult things.

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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by y11971alex »

daivid wrote:It is said that the age you start learning has a big effect on success in study of a language. Hence I am interested in the spread here.
It may have a large impact on your ability to match native speech -- after all, native speech is emulated from a young age, generally speaking; however, native speech may not actually be the 'most sophisticated' register in a language.

In studying Greek, the aim is substantially different from most other languages; we don't attempt to conduct our daily lives in this language, nor does it seem likely that we can move to a place where Attic is still spoken in the ἀγορά. Therefore, a technical understanding of grammar, being systematic and requiring some linguistic background fully to understand, may actually be more suited for a adult to acquire than for a child, for whom all these grammatical rules may seem unnecessary and arbitrary.
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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by C. S. Bartholomew »

I had no intention of learning Greek. Having been told time and time again that it was a royal pain to learn, I avoided it like the plague in school. Later on I was doing some work in generative syntax analysis and got tired of english examples, pulled out Language of the New Testament, E. V. N. Goetchius and discovered that Goetchius was thinking along similar lines with early Chomsky. Syntax got me started in NT Greek. I used the same aproach with Hebrew, a syntax priority approach.
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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by Victor »

ariphron wrote: A few years later I started learning Chinese, and it forced me to learn some very disciplined study techniques both to master the writing system and to hear and reproduce the tone distinctions.
What level of recall has your mastery of the writing system given you? Are you saying that if someone read out a Tang dynasty poem you'd never met before you'd be able to write it out, reproducing all the characters correctly? Would you be able to pick up virtually any book at random and read it without needing to look up certain characters in a dictionary? There are virtually no native Chinese who can do either of those things, let alone foreigners.

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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by y11971alex »

Victor wrote:
ariphron wrote: A few years later I started learning Chinese, and it forced me to learn some very disciplined study techniques both to master the writing system and to hear and reproduce the tone distinctions.
What level of recall has your mastery of the writing system given you? Are you saying that if someone read out a Tang dynasty poem you'd never met before you'd be able to write it out, reproducing all the characters correctly? Would you be able to pick up virtually any book at random and read it without needing to look up certain characters in a dictionary? There are virtually no native Chinese who can do either of those things, let alone foreigners.
Being a Chinese native myself, it is quite difficult for laymen to recognize all characters in a given text with perfect precision, but discerning the meaning of the sentences as a whole is not often as difficult. As Chinese is an analytical language, it is fairly easy to make an educated guess about the meaning of the word. Like Greek, ancient Chinese also had its fair share of easy texts and difficult texts. An easy text would be something like an essay written by Han-yu in the 7th Century A.D.; a difficult text would be something like oracle bones or the edicts of the early Chou Dynasty, c. 11th Century B.C. Lots of words have obscure or contradictory definitions even today, c.f. 不 is a negator when pronounced pu4, but it means "greatly" when pronounced p'i1. In such cases, it's up to the reader to make the call on what is actually meant by the text.
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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by Victor »

y11971alex wrote:Being a Chinese native myself, it is quite difficult for laymen to recognize all characters in a given text with perfect precision, but discerning the meaning of the sentences as a whole is not often as difficult. As Chinese is an analytical language, it is fairly easy to make an educated guess about the meaning of the word. Like Greek, ancient Chinese also had its fair share of easy texts and difficult texts. An easy text would be something like an essay written by Han-yu in the 7th Century A.D.; a difficult text would be something like oracle bones or the edicts of the early Chou Dynasty, c. 11th Century B.C. Lots of words have obscure or contradictory definitions even today, c.f. 不 is a negator when pronounced pu4, but it means "greatly" when pronounced p'i1. In such cases, it's up to the reader to make the call on what is actually meant by the text.
Thanks for your input! It largely confirms my own experience as a non-native learner. I've found there are two obstacles really to rapid progress in learning Chinese: one is the sheer labour involved in learning the writing system (a labour many native Chinese underestimate, in my experience); the other is the length of time Chinese has been in use, which means you need to spread your net very wide in order to become tolerably acquainted with written texts of all periods.

There's a good article (http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html) summarizing the difficulties of learning Chinese from a non-native's perspective. The following passage is particularly telling about the relative complexities of a writing system like Chinese and an alphabetic one like English.
"I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember."

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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by y11971alex »

Victor wrote:
y11971alex wrote:Being a Chinese native myself, it is quite difficult for laymen to recognize all characters in a given text with perfect precision, but discerning the meaning of the sentences as a whole is not often as difficult. As Chinese is an analytical language, it is fairly easy to make an educated guess about the meaning of the word. Like Greek, ancient Chinese also had its fair share of easy texts and difficult texts. An easy text would be something like an essay written by Han-yu in the 7th Century A.D.; a difficult text would be something like oracle bones or the edicts of the early Chou Dynasty, c. 11th Century B.C. Lots of words have obscure or contradictory definitions even today, c.f. 不 is a negator when pronounced pu4, but it means "greatly" when pronounced p'i1. In such cases, it's up to the reader to make the call on what is actually meant by the text.
Thanks for your input! It largely confirms my own experience as a non-native learner. I've found there are two obstacles really to rapid progress in learning Chinese: one is the sheer labour involved in learning the writing system (a labour many native Chinese underestimate, in my experience); the other is the length of time Chinese has been in use, which means you need to spread your net very wide in order to become tolerably acquainted with written texts of all periods.

There's a good article (http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html) summarizing the difficulties of learning Chinese from a non-native's perspective. The following passage is particularly telling about the relative complexities of a writing system like Chinese and an alphabetic one like English.
"I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember."
I personally think the "sneeze" example is prejudiced because the third character has literally just this one use. I can't think of a second context under which it would appear. Chinese is full of such characters that have just one use and won't appear elsewhere. A classic example is 葡萄 (grape) -- these two characters appear only here and in 葡萄牙 (Portugal!).
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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by ariphron »

Victor wrote:
ariphron wrote: A few years later I started learning Chinese, and it forced me to learn some very disciplined study techniques both to master the writing system and to hear and reproduce the tone distinctions.
What level of recall has your mastery of the writing system given you? Are you saying that if someone read out a Tang dynasty poem you'd never met before you'd be able to write it out, reproducing all the characters correctly? Would you be able to pick up virtually any book at random and read it without needing to look up certain characters in a dictionary? There are virtually no native Chinese who can do either of those things, let alone foreigners.
Good God, no. Please take the word "master" in the most restrictive sense. The scope of the courses I took was Mandarin vernacular with simplified characters, and anything outside of that would be self-taught and, realistically, at a low-intermediate level. Writers whose usage is well-described by the rules of my textbooks (such as Hu Shi, Ba Jin, and most contemporary bloggers) I can read without much difficulty. Contemporary writers who diverge significantly from this style (including Jin Yong) are too hard for me. My character recall is close to everything in BG2312 Layer 1 (3700 simplified characters); recognition, maybe 6000 simplified characters and the corresponding traditional characters. Basically anything that I can read in simplified characters I can also read in traditional characters, but slower and with more effort. I've taught myself the basics of classical/literary Chinese -- if you don't, your reading ability for even contemporary writing will be limited -- and I'm at the point where I might be able to handle one of the easier essays of Han Yu without much assistance. In the medium term, I hope to read extensively in Han Dynasty historical works such as the Shiji, Zhanguo Ce, and Lie Nü Zhuan.

My mastery of the writing system is such that the difficulties I still have with the language are not, for the most part, the result of seeing characters I don't recognize.

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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by daivid »

I've just started reading Dover's book on word order and on page 6 where he writes how "most of us who know Greek at all began to learn it as children". Clearly this is not true of textkit users. I suspect that though older starters are over-represented here far fewer start so early as in the fifties when Dover was writing.

His point is that as a result (of "us" starting so young) "we" all take the word order of Greek much more for granted than otherwise. Which to me confirms my suspicion that word order is going to be much more of a problem for older learners than younger.
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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by sydneylam19 »

I wish I had the time to learn Ancient Greek, foreseeing my being much busier in the years ahead. :( Right now it would already suffice to have a thorough grasp of Latin.

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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by sydneylam19 »

ariphron wrote:
Victor wrote:
ariphron wrote: A few years later I started learning Chinese, and it forced me to learn some very disciplined study techniques both to master the writing system and to hear and reproduce the tone distinctions.
What level of recall has your mastery of the writing system given you? Are you saying that if someone read out a Tang dynasty poem you'd never met before you'd be able to write it out, reproducing all the characters correctly? Would you be able to pick up virtually any book at random and read it without needing to look up certain characters in a dictionary? There are virtually no native Chinese who can do either of those things, let alone foreigners.
Good God, no. Please take the word "master" in the most restrictive sense. The scope of the courses I took was Mandarin vernacular with simplified characters, and anything outside of that would be self-taught and, realistically, at a low-intermediate level. Writers whose usage is well-described by the rules of my textbooks (such as Hu Shi, Ba Jin, and most contemporary bloggers) I can read without much difficulty. Contemporary writers who diverge significantly from this style (including Jin Yong) are too hard for me. My character recall is close to everything in BG2312 Layer 1 (3700 simplified characters); recognition, maybe 6000 simplified characters and the corresponding traditional characters. Basically anything that I can read in simplified characters I can also read in traditional characters, but slower and with more effort. I've taught myself the basics of classical/literary Chinese -- if you don't, your reading ability for even contemporary writing will be limited -- and I'm at the point where I might be able to handle one of the easier essays of Han Yu without much assistance. In the medium term, I hope to read extensively in Han Dynasty historical works such as the Shiji, Zhanguo Ce, and Lie Nü Zhuan.

My mastery of the writing system is such that the difficulties I still have with the language are not, for the most part, the result of seeing characters I don't recognize.
As a fond lover of Chinese Classics, I truly appreciate your effort to study Modern and Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese, like any ancient languages, paves the way to a fascinating world yet to be discovered by many. It has always been my wish to master Latin, Greek and Classical Chinese well, eventually breaking down cultural barriers and contributing to our better understanding of the entire human civilization from multiple perspectives.

Shiji is an unparalleled classic of Chinese History. I also recommend reading Zuozhuan, the Analects, Mengzi and Zhuangzi. This was a very influential reading list by Liang Qichao: https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E5%9 ... C.E8.A9.B1

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Re: Poll: When did you first begin serious study of Greek

Post by Hylander »

In studying Greek, the aim is substantially different from most other languages; we don't attempt to conduct our daily lives in this language, nor does it seem likely that we can move to a place where Attic is still spoken in the ἀγορά. Therefore, a technical understanding of grammar, being systematic and requiring some linguistic background fully to understand, may actually be more suited for a adult to acquire than for a child, for whom all these grammatical rules may seem unnecessary and arbitrary.
This makes sense to me.

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