Four Months of Greek

I've graduated from William Linney's Getting Started with Ancient Greek and have moved on to C. W. E. Peckett's and A. R. Munday's Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus is a really cute book: the whole thing is written in ancient Greek, but it cleverly introduces new words and grammatical constructions one at a time so you can make sense of it in context: in this way, it feels like some video games I've played where one tries to decipher an alien language to figure out why there aren't any aliens left or whatever. Meanwhile, the book tells a funny little story about Hermes giving a boy a whirlwind tour of the underworld; I'm already well-acquainted with Greek mythology, but I think this is a pretty accessible way to simultaenously introduce a student to the language and the culture. My favorite example of this in the chapters I've read so far is the use of Hades' horrible monster-dog, Kerberos, to teach numbers and adjectives: it has one body, two eyes per head, three heads, six eyes total, etc. I don't imagine anybody is following along, but on the off chance anyone is, this course of study seems pretty good to me, and I've been writing up my notes as I go.

Greek has an intimidating reputation, but as far as I can tell, the hard part is that any given word can take a lot of different shapes, and so one has to memorize all those shapes. That's annoying, certainly, but the tradeoff is that Greek has a lot less vocabulary than some other languages. Either way, though, you still have to memorize things—but memorization is just repetition, and so I've written myself some dopey flash card programs to help me practice. These are geared towards UNIX power-users like myself, but could easily be adapted for the web if there is interest.

It is little wonder to me that the Greeks invented formal logic: their very language is so precise and logical that logic seems ingrained into how they intuitively think. Reading a sentence is like solving a puzzle, and writing any but the simplest seems well beyond me at present.