I very much admire u/LukeAmadeusRanieri's pronunciation skills in both Attic and Koine Greek, effortlessly switching between the two, as well as modern Greek—sheesh!

I do have some intelligence, but it's more geared towards logic than language acquisition. I learned Koine Greek using Black's book, which I believe to be the easiest New Testament Greek grammar to absorb. I read every day and memorise vocabulary, but it takes me some effort.

As I started searching for more of Luke's material, I was amazed to learn that he also knows a whole host of other languages and is constantly learning new ones—Syriac being the latest, as far as I can tell.

I also saw him pick up Benjamin Kantor's 800-page The Pronunciation of New Testament Greek, published on 13 July 2023. By 2 November 2023—less than four months after its release—Luke had completed it, absorbed the contents of both books, and was already putting out videos on it! Wow.

So, to those polyglots with a high IQ, don't be shy or humble. Please tell us—how do you absorb challenging languages like Greek so easily?

Greetings guys and gals much much better at Greek than I am 😭 preemptive thank you so much for anyone who assists.

I'm almost done with going through the Greek of the gospel of Mark and had some questions about syntax.

νεανικος δε τις

In this word order, can it be translated as "but a certain young man" or is it more correctly "and a certain young man" ??

I posted a month or two ago to ask if folks here thought an application of this type would be useful, and got enough of a positive reaction that I went ahead and coded it up. You enter a Greek word, and the application tries to parse it, give a lemma and part-of-speech analysis, and also explain how the morphology worked. For example, if you're seeing a contracted form that you don't understand, it can tell you what the stem and ending were before contraction. The application is open-source, and it can be run either on your own machine or in a browser.

The browser-based version is available publicly here. If anyone is willing to do a little alpha testing for me, I'd appreciate it. The underlying parser is fairly mature, and it outperforms other open-source systems such as Morpheus, Stanza, and Odycy/CLTK as measured by the percentage of the time that it can get the right lemma and part of speech.

However, the web application built on top of it is something I just coded up recently, so all I'm really hoping for is some alpha testing, i.e., I'll be grateful if you give it a little test drive and tell me whether the wheels fall off. I'm interested in things like whether the Greek characters aren't displayed correctly on your device, or whether when you type your Greek input on your device, the characters aren't recognized correctly (e.g., due to encoding issues). If you find an input that causes it to give a blank white screen or an error message, that would be good to know so that I can try to reproduce the crash and fix it.

(Downloading and installing the application to run on your own machine isn't for the faint of heart right now, but if anyone wants to try it and report back, that would be cool. There is documentation on how to do it, but it would probably be easiest to do if you run Linux, and to succeed you would need some basic skills with the Linux command line and the Gnu Make utility.)

Issues I already know about include the fact that it sometimes repeats lines of output multiple times, and also that it often lacks precision in the sense that it will print out multiple possible analyses, not all of which are right. If it simply can't parse a certain word, and it says so, then that information is not especially helpful to me right now -- I can easily generate such examples myself from real-world texts, but fixing the underlying issue can be more time-consuming (or may be impractical since I'm just working with a certain set of data sources I've cobbled together, and they don't cover every possible fact about Greek).

Thanks in advance for any help!

I'm aware of the nasal infixes in Proto Indo European, but AFAIK that was no longer productive by the Classical period.

φέρω (Ancient) -> φέρνω (modern)

παίρω (Ancient) -> παίρνω (Byzantine, modern)

I'm not asking for a translation of a Greek text (since I understand it perfectly and can translate it myself).

What I'm asking is how I should render it in English so that a native English speaker can easily understand it (since English isn’t my first language). This is a question of style. So I'm making use of the exception mentioned in the second rule, because I need precise answers, not just a translation.

Here’s part of the text I’m trying to translate, which shows the use of nominalized verbs:

"σημαινει γαρ το ειναι και το εστι, και οτι αληθες, ως το μη ειναι, οτι αληθες, καθως εν τω τεταρτω των μετα τα φυσικα Αριστοτελης φησιν· ως γουν του συνόλου λεγεται το εστιν, ο δη το ον εχει, ουτω και το εν αυθις του συνολου του οντος ενος."

I would translate το ειναι as "the to be", το εστιν as "the it is", and το ον as "the being."

I asked a native English speaker for their opinion on my translation, and they told me that "the to be" isn’t something anyone would say in English, but rather "the being." However, since they didn’t know Greek (or the grammar of their own language), they didn’t realize that "to be" corresponds to the Greek infinitive.

So, what do you think would be the best way to translate these terms so that they sound natural to a native English speaker? Keep in mind, I can't use "entity" because the author uses οντοτης to mean something else entirely, just like with "essence" and ουσια.

How would you translate these terms to make them understandable to a native English speaker?

I'm still a beginner but am ambitious. I hope to have finished Athenaze Book 1 by the end of the Summer 2025. Then I'll continue reading, of course Book 2, but lots of other stuff. I'm really loving it.

However, I also want to learn Modern Greek. My original plan was to wait until 2026, by which time I hope to have finished Athenaze 2.

Of course it varies for different people, but would it be a bad idea to start with Modern Greek before I get to at least Athenze book 2?

My ancient Greek teacher is Greek and I'm learning modern Greek pronounciation. I'd love to start but am worried it might be confusing.

Any advice? Or anyone have similar experience?

Thanks!

I’d like some tips on how I could learn to read or speak Ancient Greek (attic Greek, to be precise). I’ve seen that I should learn modern Greek first, but I don’t think that would be necessary as I’m already learning to translate Ancient Greek at school. I guess you could call that learning to read too, but I’m also very interested in learning to speak it, which we don’t learn at school at all. I’ve grown up speaking three languages at home, so I’ve got the skills to learn a new language, it’s just that the resources for learning Ancient Greek are much more scarce

I've noticed these diacritics on Wiktionary, but not as much in other resources I've used, so I was just curious as to why that might be (aside from Wiktionary - understandably - having their own guidelines around how AG is transcribed).

Hi, so I learn translating Ancient Greek at school, but recently I've decided to learn the correct pronounciations of everything, since we learn pronounciation more accustomed to our language since all we do is translate and not speak it. I frequently come up to my teacher for questions for the pronounciations (as he has studied them), but he doesn't know when the rho was trilled or tapped. I also couldn't find anything on the internet. So if anyone knows, please tell me, specifically for Attic Greek. I'd also like to know if it was tapped or trilled when it comes after another consonant, like "κρ" for example. All I know is that the rho has a voiceless trill at the beginning of a word.

Hello. I recently bought Logos to start my greek studies because I have heard that it was perfect for beginners. I've already nailed the alphabet down from youtube videos, including all the caveats. I started reading the first chapter of Logos (θεοί, άνθρωποι και Θηρια) but for some reason it seems rather difficult for me. I don't understand what roughly half the notes on the side of text are supposed to mean. Besides that, sometimes I don't understand what the grammar is trying to explain other than by trying to infer differences between examples. I've found using youtube videos far more helpful to get on the same frequency of the book than trying to actually slog through it. Is this a normal part of the learning process? Am I missing important supporting material that i dont know of? Did other beginners feel overwhelmed by Logos at the beginning?

Hi Everyone Maybe someone knows where I can find Hermias on Phaedrus in original Greek I could not find it anywhere.

Thanks in advance to all

I feel like I came across something like this years ago, but my internet searches have been unsuccessful. Did I gaslight myself or have one of you an idea of what I’m talking about? Any reviews?

Thank you!

Hi there,

I know that there are a few books that you can train prose composition in Latin and Greek with. My question is: Are there any prose composition books where you can train translationg Latin into Greek or Greek into Latin? They seem to be hard to find.

Any recommendations will be most wellcome.

P.S.: I will probably search for answers in other subreddits, too, like r/classics and  r/latin If this is the wrong subreddit for such questions, please let me know.

Found. this guy on YouTube, a Cambridge graduate I believe, with extremely helpful lessons for self-learners. Since I've never had a tutor, I'm in the dark of the accuracy of his pronounciation.

Can anyone tell if it's correct? If not, are there any sources to learn it from?

Thank you!

Hello all,

First off, please pardon the vulgarity of the word. I wanted to know what a person named literally "F**ker" would be in Ancient Greek? My understanding is that the word for the verb "to f**k" is "βινέω". Based on that, would the derived name for a male be "βῑνέων"?

Hi all! I'm trying to translate some of Plutarch's Nicias for a project. I'm normally decent at Ancient Greek but I'm in a weird headspace at the moment and I've never read any Plutarch so please forgive me if this is a stupid question!!

Anyways, it's 12.2-4: ...μετὰ τὸ ψηφίσασθαι τὸν πόλεμον Ἀθηναίους καὶ στρατηγὸν ἑλέσθαι πρῶτον ἐκεῖνον μετʼ Ἀλκιβιάδου καὶ Λαμάχου, πάλιν ἐκκλησίας γενομένης, ἀναστὰς ἀπέτρεπε καὶ διεμαρτύρετο...

I'm a little confused by μετὰ τὸ... ἐκεῖνον. Firstly, can an articular infinitive (here: τὸ ψηφίσασθαι) take an object? i.e. not a noun in attributive position, but an accusative (here: τὸν πόλεμον) outside of the article-infinitive construction? Or is this an accusative of respect or something? Likewise, what is Ἀθηναίους doing? Is that an accusative of respect? How does it function with the articular infinitive? How is it functioning with the preposition?

It seems like the whole clause is a prepositional phrase following μετὰ, and I clearly get the meaning in English, but I need to know what all of these infinitives and accusatives are doing here. Why does it seem like an indirect statement to me?? Are all the accusatives there because they're the objects of ἀπέτρεπε or διεμαρτύρετο and maybe μετὰ is just adverbial? Or just modifying the articular infinitive?

Also - please let me know if I've posted this in the wrong place or something. It's my first time posting on here.

Thank you!!

I know Άι γαμήσου(fuck you) but I need to know more

Homer and Hesiod often have prefixes like ευ and ανα (and many others) not attached to a words they are connected to. This would seem to indicate that they function as adverbs. Is this an evolution in Green language or merely a stylistic or due to preserving the metre?

Hi all,

So “everyone” recommends to use the Italian Athenaze. I have been trying, but it doesn’t really work for me. There is so much extra vocabulary, making it really hard to get through, looking up words in the dictionary all the time. (I know a little bit of Italian, but not enough to use the Greek to Italian translations.) I study from the English edition and wanted to supplement my reading with the Italian one.

Am I the only one for which the Italian edition is not working?

Thanks, Markus

I feel like Athenaze is the one resource that is suggested most often, especially when people are looking for resources similar to Lingua Latina per se illustrata. I was in a course that used Athenaze, and tried to use various versions of it on my own (such as the Italian one), but I felt that there was a significant distance between the learning style employed in Athenaze (even the Italian one) and the one employed in LLPSI. Whereas LLPSI starts very slowly and repeats the same sentence form with variations that introduce new vocabulary (such that you can rely on the story alone), the very second sentence in Athenaze already requires you to have external help (vocabulary lists, etc.). Does anyone know of any Ancient Greek learning resources that are closer to LLPSI in style?

I am dusting off my Greek skills after about 20 years. I used to be pretty good at Greek and I do remember a good amount of the paradigms. Do people have strong opinions about the resources listed above?

The advantage of Hanson and Quinn for me is that I just have to pull it off my shelf rather than buy something.

Hi all.

Is there light at the tunnel, even if only in 1-2 years? When I’m done with Athenaze II, will I essentially have learned all there is to Ancient Greek grammar? Except for the dual and a few extras?

It appears to me that the forms of grammar are many, but I can see the point when I would have mastered them. Vocabulary seems like a different matter entirely. What will I know by the end of Athenaze (English edition)? 1,000 or maybe 2,000 words? Versus tens of thousands out there?

What do you think?

Thanks, Markus

In NE Book 8, Bekker Page 1159b, Aristotle talks about asymmetric friendships. His examples are Father-Son, Elder-Younger, Governing-Governed, and notably Man-Woman. Now, it’s nothing new to me that he is misogynistic, but even the other Relations gave me pause to think. He says that in each relationship, one is “better”, and that the better one should be loved more than doing the loving. It is also clear that the acts of friendship are not symmetric. Rather, the reason these can even be called friendships (because that requires some kind of ἰσότης) is because each is doing what can be expected of them (κατ᾽ ἀξίαν). My questions is: Who does more? From our modern perspective I immediately assumed parents do more for their kids than the other way around, but that doesn’t quite fit the model. Another type of relationship he didn’t mention here is Master-Slave. And I’m sure he doesn’t say the Master does more for the Slave than vice versa. Therefore, is it so that he expects Children to serve their parents, younger people to serve their elders, the populace to serve the rulers, women to serve men? (Serve is the meaning of doing more acts of friendship) Because I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what he is saying.

I'm thinking of doing a self-directed course starting with the 2 John course. Can someone who has taken an Omelien courses by Jordash Kiffiak tell me your thoughts? What kind of level is assumed? How much content is there?