Rating: 
Summary: An acceptable intro to Greek, but not the best
Review: My university uses ATHENAZE books 1 and 2 to teach beginning Greek, which is fine when you have professors who love to teach grammar and drill people. The book immerses students in the language and the stories they write are engaging, but the order they present material in is somewhat confusing and you don't learn the grammar just by reading about it in the book. If your professor enjoys reading the grammar pages to you, instead of trying to relate them in other ways, you may want to look into getting a second text.
Rating: 
Summary: Athe-NAZI. Avoid This Book at All Costs.
Review: We used the sequence Athenaze I & II for my Elementary Ancient Greek course, which is a two-semester sequence. A word of warning: if you�re looking to learn Koine (Biblical) Greek, this is not the book for you anyway. Attic Greek is much more difficult than Koine, and if all you want to do is read the Bible in Greek, then you probably don�t want to spend the time and energy necessary to learn Attic. If you want to read the ancient Greek philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, etc., the playwrights (Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, etc.), and so on, then you want to learn Attic. Unfortunately, this book isn�t for you either!First of all, it begins with an exceptionally dull, uninteresting, and almost excruciating story of a farmer named �Dicaeopolis,� who (only later you learn) is based on a character from one of Aristophanes� plays. It is a very loose rendering at that, so don�t think you learn anything about Aristophanes from this character. He has a son and a lazy slave, who he constantly berates for sleeping rather than working. That is the substance of the first several chapters. Not exactly what you thought you were getting into when you said to yourself one day, �Hey, I want to read Plato in the original.� The stories and the corollary vocabulary you learn, especially in the first book, are very limited. You feel like you�re back in 1st grade. If that wasn�t bad enough, the descriptions it gives of grammatical structures (syntax) are second-rate, at best. Often, the authors just leave some examples out there for you to guess at and don�t illustrate them at all with descriptions or commentary. You�re often left just guessing at what the authors may have meant or how the form/structure works. Also, it seems as though there is no order whatsoever to the way they present the material. In fact, many times, the forms of verbs/nouns are given in this order: the more difficult form first, the easier form second. This makes no sense, given that once you know the easier forms, you can build on your knowledge of them and incorporate the more difficult forms a little more easily (if that made any sense.) Also, the tables they give that present the conjugations/declensions of verbs/nouns are counter-intuitive. You have to force yourself to adapt to their mode of presentation, not because you have to think a different way for a different and ancient language (which you do), but because the manner of presentation is so bizarre. Of course you have to expect to encounter difficulty in learning Greek, but you shouldn�t have to encounter difficulty in learning how to use the textbook to learn Greek. Given all these negative things, there is a point in this book�s favor, which is why I give it 2 stars instead of 1. The authors tend to include an adapted selection from some ancient author (typically Herodotus or Thucydides, until the very end of Book II) each chapter. They provide extensive vocabulary glosses so you can battle your way through without having constantly to flip back to the glossary or in a lexicon. [However, it should be noted that their vocabulary glosses are often bizarre; they often tend not to give you an English rendering of the word that best fits the sense of the Greek, but some variation of it, which isn�t helpful in learning vocabulary.] The passages become less adapted as you work your way through some of the more complex grammar. For example, I compared one of the adaptations of Herodotus to the original and found that only slight changes were made�for example, they changed the dialectical forms into the Attic you�re familiar with, and they only slightly modify the vocabulary in some places so that a word is used that you are familiar with but is still equivalent to the original. This is far and away the best thing about this book, but the adaptations are rare. Book II is where you get more of them; you don�t really get any in Book I, as a matter of fact. Overall, I would have to warn people away from this book, which I came to label �Athe-Nazi,� if that should say anything to you about how I felt about it. Apparently the book From Alpha to Omega is a pretty good introductory text for Greek, but I have never personally used it, so I can�t say for sure. I just know that Athenaze is not very good, not at all. It really only allows you to obtain a sort of hit-or-miss proficiency with Greek, rather than a strong, elementary-level ability to analyze Greek prose. You MAY be able to get the latter if you have a good teacher who can answer your questions in detail, which I, luckily, had. I owe my knowledge of Greek to her, not to this book.
|
