I've been thinking a lot of my goals for different Greek dialects. I said earlier that I want to be able to produce Epic Greek and read Attic passively, but I'm walking that back a little. Epic Greek is only known in poetry and it isn't useful for general composition or conversation (word order is almost completely free and depends a lot on the meter, so I just translate from English with the words in whatever random order pops into my head), so I think it's Attic that I'm going to eventually try to speak and write fluently. With Epic, I do want to achieve a basic level of being able to think in the language and do the Pharr translation exercises from English in my head, but that's probably the extent of it. I think the only reasonable level of fluency in Epic Greek is to read it fluently.
My general plan has not changed much, and I'll still be working through Pharr at least for the whole summer. So far I've still only completed chapter 3, but I have the vocabulary and morphology through chapter 5 in my Anki deck. I'm going on a short vacation in a couple of days so hopefully I can put even more chapters into my deck. That way I should be able to keep up during my downtime. Although the book has 77 chapters, I'll have learned most of the major concepts by chapter 30 or so, and after chapter 50 there are just a few review chapters and then it just walks you through the rest of
Iliad book 1. After that, the plan is to learn as much new Homeric vocabulary as I can (by frequency) so I can comfortably read through bilingual texts without having to glance at the English side too much. I'll plan on starting with the
Odyssey rather than finishing the
Iliad right away. Odysseus has tons of iconic adventures; I think that will be more interesting than Achilles just going H.A.M. for a few hundred pages.
Once I feel like I'm ready to start learning Attic, I think I want to focus on conversational and general writing ability more than reading comprehension. Not that there isn't tons of great material to read in Attic, but there's so much to get through in the Epic dialect that it's probably better to start slow with Attic. I'm not exactly sure what I'll focus on to be able to speak and write Attic since even the best resources seem to focus on passive skills. But I suppose I'll build that bridge when I come to it. The
Polis series seems interesting but sadly it teaches Koine, not Attic. Maybe I can find some Attic conversation partners online. Italian
Athenaze does have some workbooks so that might help with my written Attic skills. My Italian is quite basic but between my advanced level of French and by then hopefully a good knowledge of Epic Greek, I should be able to figure it out.
I used to think that after Navajo, no other language would be able to intimidate me with its grammar, but Ancient Greek is coming close. Ancient Greek verbs are like Spanish or Italian on steroids. Using auxiliary verbs for the Perfect tenses? That's for suckers! Throw in the optative mood, passive, and mediopassive, and loads of other features along with the dual number that I'm stubbornly flipping to the back of the book to learn, and it takes about eight pages to write through every form that a verb can have, although that includes definitions in English so without that it might be
only 4-5 pages. But tbh I think after all that Ancient Greek has nothing on Navajo verbs, I just haven't gotten far enough in Navajo to really pull my hair out.
Plan Summary: Rest of the summer, focus on Pharr and Pimsleur Greek. In the fall, learn spoken Hebrew in the car using Pimsleur and then FSI; the rest of my study time will be focused on finishing Pharr and transitioning to Epic vocabulary expansion and extensive reading with bilingual texts. At some point if I feel like I'm hitting diminishing returns in Epic I might want to start focusing on Attic speaking and writing skills instead; I don't know how much I fancy getting my skills to lopsided with great reading ability but no speaking and writing ability. When I'm done with spoken Hebrew maybe I can listen to audio recordings of the epics with reconstructed pronunciation so I can build up my listening skills too.
: Pharr -
Homeric Greek : Pimsleur Modern Greek