Greek: An Intensive Course

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding text for new students of Greek
Review: As a 37 year old physician, I decided to learn Ancient Greek on my own without any prior experience in classical languages or grammar. Having reviewed a few other texts, this is absolutely the most useful and easily accessible. That's not to say that it's easy, but everything is explained in a well-organized and complete manner. The drills and exercises are very well done and it was thrilling to be able to tackle such a difficult subject on my own. My only minor issue with this book is that there is no answer key for the exercises, so one has to puzzle them out for oneself--a good experience in itself--but there are periodic self-scoring tests with answers that do keep you on track. Overall a wonderful introduction to Greek for the novice.

Rating:
Summary: You can learn Ancient Greek
Review: As an avid reader of the classics I wanted to learn Ancient Greek so that I could appreciate the works in the original language. I started out at my local library where I found very few books on the subject. The few that I did find were too advanced or were poorly written.

Hansen's text book is different. It starts out slowly with pronunciation and alphabet lessons. These are very valuble and were the elements that were most lacking in the other texts. The book builds to syntax and vocabulary. The great thing about the book is that they put easy reading and speaking drills early on. This makes you feel like you are learning and builds your confidence. The book also stresses thinking in Greek, since it makes the language easier to learn and since Greek is one of the most expressive languages.

This truly is an intensive course in the language and some devotion to study is required. However, it is fairly simple and fun to learn from the book. At the completion of the lessons, you will have a basic understanding of the Greek language and will be able to express ideas in the language. I am not very good at learning languages. If I can learn ancient greek so can you.

Other good features of this book are its Greek/English English/Greek translation dictionary for many usefuls words and phrases.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding and currently without rival
Review: I have taught ancient Greek to students from middle school age to graduate students for more than ten years. This book is the best available, hands down. It is not condescending. It contains no serious errors; such infelicities as there are in its Greek sentences are to be excused on the grounds of pedagogical expediency. Its grammatical and morphological sections are the very definition of clarity and succinctness.

It may be guilty of an occasional oversimplification or a venial sin of omission. It leaves certain declensional systems and conditional constructions to the appendix, for example, and it certainly should include the an account of the dual, at least for nouns, somewhere in the body of the text. But those shortcomings are easily outweighed by the advantages of this textbook. It's the only one I have found where a student can actually a) get through the morphology and grammar of the Attic dialect in a realistic amount of time (Athenaze, in contrast, takes FOREVER) and b) leave students actually ready to tackle, say, a Platonic dialogue or a Euripidean tragedy when they're done. (Athenaze takes a distant second on this count, too.)

Other shortcomings: not enough vocabulary to give students a real "working minimum". Relegation of some fairly important morphology and grammar to the appendix. Or, conversely, Other strengths: Doesn't overwhelm students trying to give them a "working minimum vocabulary", I take it because the contents of such a hypothetical working minimum vocabulary vary widely depending on the genre or author the student is going to tackle.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent, Not-For-Dummies Greek Course
Review: I picked up this book recently with a friend with the intention of learning Attic Greek. We are both Latin students, and having heard many good things about this book, we decided to try it.

After just a few weeks of work, I can already see the difference between this text and others: this book assumes that the reader is capable of understanding a language vastly more complicated than English. Having a strong background in Latin and an open mind definitely helps, though; I don't suggest using this text if you lack either of these qualities.

However, if you are planning to work alone, this may not be the best option: the title does not lie when it reads "Intensive." I know that working with a friend has helped me so far, and I can only imagine how much help a qualified instructor would be.

After the first few units, I was already finding myself reading and understanding parts of Plato's Republic and other authentic Greek texts.

Either way, I highly recommend this series over the other Greek texts out there, and i hope you pick this one up.

Rating:
Summary: Use Mastronarde instead
Review: The main problem with this book is the overwhelming size of the units. This not only makes it quite difficult to work through the exercises since you have to digest so much morphology to be able to do them, but it also means that by the end of the book, though you will have a good grasp of syntax and morphology, your working vocabulary will still be quite small. I also found the order in which the grammatical concepts are presented to be somewhat unnatural - the subjunctive and optative are introduced before you have a good feel for the indicative mood and its endings. The verb forms are presented in such quick succession that I ended up not feeling very comfortable with them.
On the plus side, though, the basic concepts morphology and syntax are explained very thoroughly and clearly, and the vocabulary notes (usage notes on each individual word, possible alternative meanings, idiomatic uses, etc.) were quite helpful. There were also plenty of drills and reading sentences for practice. Overall, I'd say this book might be well suited to its original purpose - a workshop setting where all of basic grammar is covered in 6 weeks - but for the general reader it is a bit too dense. For the aspiring self-taught Classicist, I'd recommend Mastronarde. I myself ended up switching over to his book after 10 units of Hansen and Quinn, and find it to be better balanced overall, with shorter, more approachable units, and better organized chapter vocabularies.