Two Months of Greek

[sdi]

As I mentioned, I'm studying ancient Greek. Most of the vocabulary my textbook has been giving me so far consists of farm animals, so the exercises I'm working on right now are translating silly things like, "we sleep all the time because we are cats," or "he has horses because he is a farmer," or "the pigs are chasing the farmer."

I figure that makes sense, though, since that's the kind of vocabulary we teach to children, too. But that got me wondering... is there an ancient children's book I could attempt to read?

Wait a minute, of course there is!—that's what Æsop's Fables is for! So I dug up a critical edition of the earliest version we know about—written by Babrius c. AD 200—and tried to see what I could parse. I can't read any of it yet, but I can make out enough words to mostly guess which fables are which, and even recognized one of the titles—"The North Wind and the Sun"—at a glance.

I suppose that's not bad for two months of work at maybe 15–20 minutes a day. If you're monolingual, curious about studying another language, and are interested in a gauge of how far you can expect to come in that time, there's at least a stake in the ground.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

Good luck, my friend! Although I speak (not very well) a handful of Latin-based languages, I can't get past the different alphabet when it comes to Greek. I suspect you will get a lot out of the Fables, however.

[sdi]

Thank you! When I was a teenager, I was enrolled in a private Christian high school, and one thing I got out of it was a little bit of biblical Greek. I was surprised to find I remembered most of the alphabet, so that's helped!

I've read lots of the fables in translation, of course, but I was amused to find when I looked at Babrius that a bunch of them were ones I'd never heard before! I decided not to read them all in English, since it'll be more fun to try to puzzle them out once I have enough grammar under my belt.

[emmanuelg]

Hi SDI--
Wow! It's hard enough to go from one language to two, but when you throw in an ancient language with a different alphabet, it is quite impressive that you are already recognizing parts of Aesop's fables in their original form.

I have found the Pimsleur Method (TM) of language learning to be a great way to learn to converse in a foreign language. While Ancient Greek is much different from Modern Greek, since you want to sing and recite the orphic hymns in their original language, Modern Greek lessons might help give you a feel for the spoken language. At least some Pimsleur languages are available through public libraries, and Greek (and many more) is available through Audible.
Here's a link to a review:
https://www.mezzoguild.com/pimsleur-review/

Wishing you all the best in this endeavor!
--Emmanuel G
It won't help you _read_ written Greek, just speak it.

[sdi]

Thank you, I'll check it out!