Koine Greek before Ancient Greek and "Polis"

[n_j_f]

As I am due to start Ancient Greek at university this year, I have been looking around for supplementary resources in addition to the textbook, JACT Reading Greek. Being a fan of the natural method, the first point of call was automatically Assimil Le grec ancien as well as some books along similar lines to Lingua Latina such as the Italian edition of Athenaze.

In my search, I came across Polis: Speaking Ancient Greek as a Living Language which looks interesting due to the accompanying audio and videos. Somewhere in either the accompanying material or in a review, it was suggested that one should start learning Koine Greek prior to getting to grips with the Attic dialect of the Ancient Greek language rather than the traditional pedagogy of Classical Studies which would teach Greek with texts from varying places and eras. My initial impression would be that this approach makes sense; I wouldn't teach English through the simultaneous use of Shakespearean texts, 19th century novels and extracts from newspapers and magazines of the modern day. Having said that, although I am aware of the development of Koine Greek from the Attic dialect and the general consensus that the grammar of the former is simplified from the latter, I don't really know enough about the languages and the differences to make that judgement. I always figured that Koine Greek would only be of interest to a biblical scholar or someone with a passion for the Byzantine empire.

Does anyone have any opinions on the notion of learning Koine to learn Ancient Greek? Any opinions on the Polis series in general? My interest is probably more to do with the similarities with Lingua Latina and the accompanying audio. From what I can tell, only Reading Greek, Assimil, Polis and Athenaze have audio.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Reading Greek served me well as a text book when I began studying Ancient Greek on my own. Most especially it provided a good foundation for the grammar the reader of Greek faces most often. Ancient Greek brings with it not one but two 900-pound gorillas. One is verb conjugations and their use. Some verbs can have, at least theoretically, hundreds of forms, and Ancient Greek makes far heavier use of participles than does English. The other 900-pound gorilla is the sheer size of the vocabulary and the fact that words can have many meanings that are not always at least at first glance related.

Since my beginning days, I have read, almost always with a lot of help like interlinear and parallel texts, a lot of history, including all of Xenophon's Anabasis, much of Herodotus, and a bit of Thucydides, some of the poems in the Greek Anthology, some Plato including the Apology, a bit of the drama (Wasps, Euripides' Antigone and half of Hippolytus), and bits and pieces of other work. I have also read a handful of books of the Bible, mostly from the Old Testament, and a few paragraphs here and there of Byzantine historians.

By any measure, Koine grammar is easier to master than the grammar of Ancient Greek. The vocabulary is a wash, especially if you are familiar with the Bible, and taking into account that there is less of it in the Bible than in Ancient Greek. I have never been able to find a study of just how many words Koine has retained from Ancient Greek.

As for audio, I agree that hearing helps learning, but when I first looked into some audio for Ancient Greek, I was surprised and disappointed to find out how little there is. Yes, there is some, but I would bet that one audiobook of say Tolstoy's War and Peace (if there is such a thing) would have more audio than all the audio of Ancient Greek put together. So if you want to use audio to help you learn Ancient Greek beyond what you learn from Polis, you will have to make your own.

In conclusion, surely having a firm grasp of Koine would put you in a better place for learning Ancient Greek than having no Greek at all. As would knowing Modern Greek, for that matter. As for me, looking back on it, I am glad I bit the bullit and started on Ancient Greek right from the start.

[n_j_f]

Reading Greek served me well as a text book when I began studying Ancient Greek on my own. Most especially it provided a good foundation for the grammar the reader of Greek faces most often. Ancient Greek brings with it not one but two 900-pound gorillas. One is verb conjugations and their use. Some verbs can have, at least theoretically, hundreds of forms, and Ancient Greek makes far heavier use of participles than does English. The other 900-pound gorilla is the sheer size of the vocabulary and the fact that words can have many meanings that are not always at least at first glance related.

Since my beginning days, I have read, almost always with a lot of help like interlinear and parallel texts, a lot of history, including all of Xenophon's Anabasis, much of Herodotus, and a bit of Thucydides, some of the poems in the Greek Anthology, some Plato including the Apology, a bit of the drama (Wasps, Euripides' Antigone and half of Hippolytus), and bits and pieces of other work. I have also read a handful of books of the Bible, mostly from the Old Testament, and a few paragraphs here and there of Byzantine historians.

By any measure, Koine grammar is easier to master than the grammar of Ancient Greek. The vocabulary is a wash, especially if you are familiar with the Bible, and taking into account that there is less of it in the Bible than in Ancient Greek. I have never been able to find a study of just how many words Koine has retained from Ancient Greek.

As for audio, I agree that hearing helps learning, but when I first looked into some audio for Ancient Greek, I was surprised and disappointed to find out how little there is. Yes, there is some, but I would bet that one audiobook of say Tolstoy's War and Peace (if there is such a thing) would have more audio than all the audio of Ancient Greek put together. So if you want to use audio to help you learn Ancient Greek beyond what you learn from Polis, you will have to make your own.

In conclusion, surely having a firm grasp of Koine would put you in a better place for learning Ancient Greek than having no Greek at all. As would knowing Modern Greek, for that matter. As for me, looking back on it, I am glad I bit the bullit and started on Ancient Greek right from the start.

Thanks for the detailed and interesting response.

Although I knew there would be less audio material for Ancient Greek than other languages, including Latin, I was also disappointed at how little was available. I believe that there are audio recordings of Homer and some of the more well-known writings but as far as actual learning material, there only seems to be a small selection. Learning material for Sanskrit seems to be the same situation, but this is compensated by a large amount of recorded material (although admittedly this is mainly chants).

Usually, I don't follow the theory of learning language 1 to help learn language 2 — e.g. learning Italian to learn Latin, or learning Esperanto to learn another European language — unless someone was planning on learning both language 1 and 2 anyway. For instance, I am hoping to eventually learn Sanskrit and Hindi, so I wouldn't be adverse to learning Hindi first; but otherwise it seems like investing too much time, money and energy for only a small advantage. However, in the case of Polis I was really impressed with the methodology although I only had a passing interest in learning Koine Greek previously. According to the introduction, there are a lot of texts I had wanted to study that I assumed would be Classical Greek texts but are Koine, so that's another motivating factor.

So I think I'll stick with Reading Greek and Assimil for now and look at Polis down the line. If I ever get round to starting my log, I'll keep a record of how I'm progressing.