Can I Ever Be Fluent In Ancient Greek? 

More and more I'm seeing polyglots say that language instruction is typically done exactly backward. They generally recommend: 1) Get the alphabet and sounds down first. 2) Accumulate words and phrases. 3) Read as much as you can without worrying about understanding every word. 4) Then tackle the grammar. This is the pattern children follow when learning their native language.

Other resources that should be mentioned are the Polymathy or ScorpioMartianus RU-vid channels (by Luke Ranieri).

I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to the people who are creating "Comprehensible input" materials for Greek, especially when it is presented as stories. That is how to learn vocabulary we just need more and more material prepared for us. Comprehensible Input is the path.

I'm from Greece and i don't speak KOINE greek but if i read something in Koine or they speak to me in Koine i can fully understand

I'm Brazilian, and I've been learning English as my first foreign language. The method of diving into the language as must as possible is correct. My experience confirms it.

This was very informative, interesting, and encouraging! Thank you!

Thank you for the video. That has been a very great inspiration for me

Very useful and encouraging video! Thanks!

There is now a modern updated version of Pharr's "Homeric Greek" which is much easier to understand than his original 1920 version. Also, Owen and Goodspeed's "Homeric Vocabularies" is excellent because it ONLY has words that occur in Homer, and it lists them by how commonly they occur so you can learn the most common ones first. So thank you for mentioning both of these excellent sources on learning Homeric Greek!

Revisiting this video after two years. That's quite an impressive Greek library you've got there! I envy you, sir!!!!!

Very good selection of resources, very useful! I highly recommend listening to audio material such as a podcast like " ho dia nuktos dialogos". Input first, guys! :-)

Thank you!

Good video, bro. I really like Athenaze!

Thanks Dane, some really useful info there. Some of the books... Homeric Greek (Pharr, free online), Homeric Vocabularies (Owen and Goodspeed, free online), Anabasis interlinear text, A First Greek Course (Rouse), Rouse's Greek Boy.

Schönes Video, hat mir sehr gut gefallen. Ich bringe mir gerade selber Altgriechisch bei und benutze die Shadowing Methode von A. Arguelles mit dem Buch Athenaze. Es macht mir so am meisten Spaß 😊

I am enthusiastic about ancient (and modern) Hellenic language and culture. This video hits the spot on the fact that such a language can be learned the same way one acquires a modern, living language. I am currently studying modern and Koine, and just casually reading some of the ancient Ionian dialect to get a feel for it.

I like very much and it is my own thoughts, that you should supplement grammar heavily with any help you can get, because obviously, there is no real immersion. Increasingly I think that , especially for younger people, modern Greek will be of definite help in term of getting vocab and real feeling of the language, which didn't change that much since Homer. I am Russian and I had been bombarding myself with English vocab for twenty plus years and there is no end :) Lately I've completed a bachelor's at UC Davis in Classics. exhausted

I naively first tried the grammar-translation method since it was what the textbook I picked up tried for, and I found myself more like the guy in Searle's chinese room than someone who understood the language. It's one thing to be syntactic and a whole other thing to be semantic.

The reason for people saying that you'll only ever become really good at using commentaries and dictionaries but not fluent is that the ancieng languages have been taught with that focus (grammar first, highly analytical, almost no input let alone active production) for more than 100 years now. To make it short: There were times, 150-200+ years ago, when educated people actually were fluent in Latin and perhaps even read Ancient Greek. You can find references like that in biographies of poets and higher educated people. The way we learn languages at schools and universities, especially Latin and AG, but also modern ones, is just messed up. Which anybody knows who really ever gained fluency in any foreign language. Because it DOES NOT WORK that way. It should be INPUT FIRST, a lot of it, and then introducing necessary portions of grammar.

it's really different from the way we learn greek in Italy at school. we start with attic and ionic, the first 2 years, but then we learn to translate allmost every dialect, homer and hesiod too, reading them, in other 3 years at school. then at university, after, if you want to study greek is somehow different, but you should learn greek! not a single dialect, and be ready to read eurypides as mutch as apollonius rodius and polibius, or you miss the point in learning classical greek.

Some people say the same thing about Arabic but just like Greek, it’s ultimately a language people had to naturally obtain and use. Being peripherally aware of grammar while focusing on learning words through context is optimal. You can’t avoid some brute memorization at the beginning but my progress has skyrocketed in Arabic since I just started listing and reading, ideally listening while reading to videos and texts made by native Arabic speakers. You can make any language look intimidating. I speak two modern Latin languages and could make all the verb tenses and moods look so scary if I sat there explaining all of them in detail. Pretty much the only factor which adds difficulty to learning a language is linguistic proximity to your native language or a language you know well, and there is much worse than Greek out there since it’s at least indo-European and has influenced so many European languages

There is a really easy way to learn Koine: 1. Learn the Greek alphabet; 2. Get hold of such a book as _Teach Yourself New Testament Greek_ or some other book that covers the basics, then read it through in a day. Yes, one day. The object is to understand the logic of the language, not to memorize the details; 3. Then, grab an interlinear - preferably one based on the UBS4 text (there is a UBS5 out there, but it doesn't appear to have any interlinear editions yet) - and start reading a chapter a day. It might take 1/2 hour to do that one chapter. Within a year, you'll be done with the whole New Testament, and by the end, you won't need the interlinear anymore, and it will all have happened so painlessly, you won't even have noticed when the actual moment came that you dispensed with the interlinear and just read the Greek line. No, you won't be speaking or writing, but it will more than suffice for you to read out loud with understanding and engage with the text without having to look much up in the dictionary. Now about that business of "moving to ancient Greece", of course you can't do that. An old acquaintance majored in classics at university, and for a time lived in Greece. She never did manage to learn Modern Greek well, but occasionally, she tried to communicate with the locals in Ancient Greek, and she reports that they looked at her as if she were Homer's pet dog :P

I'm learning ancient greek for 4 months now and picked up my NT bible to read random verses last week. It worked fine mostly, which proves your point. Fluency is achievable. Could you kindly recommend an online ressource to listen to the NT in ancient greek? Thank you! Nils

The ancients weren't supergeniuses, they also struggled with their own languages back when those were live languages. Don't stress over knowing every itty bitty detail spoken in some location somewhere in the ancient world, no one knows it for sure, our sources are too sparse. What you can do, is learn, say, 80% of the language in however long it takes you, and work on your skill. And you have to have a solid reason to do it, or else you might run outta steam. (Stubborness is a valid reason)

I recommend that you get a bilingual translation, where the English is on the facing page. That way you will be learning phrases and in due time it will come together. Read the New Testament. The language is written for the common people, and you will be more familiar with its ideas.

Hi Dane! Thanks for the video. Currently I'm learning latin, and its a bit of a pain but I'm sure I will do well, is my first ancient language. I wanted to ask to you, do you have any thoughts on Assimil books for latin/ancient greek? Have you tried them?

be fluent in neohellenic modern greek and voila you are fluent in all.

I don't know a lot of greek being half.but my mom spoke a form of doric it's different

I’ve heard that you can easily go from Attic Greek to Koine Greek, but not the other way. One Biblical Greek teacher uses Athenaze.

This video is spot on. The argument that "Ancient Greek is just too complicated" is absurd. It's just a language like any other. Not only that, it was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire. Tons of normal people learned it, including stupid people. Most learned it as their second language, many learned it as their 3rd or 4th language. Most of these people couldn't even read, much less study grammar rules. Same goes for Latin. You're absolutely right that the problem is pedagogy. The reason people struggle with the typical methods is because those methods don't work.

εὖγε φίλε, κάλλιστα ἀκούω σοῦ καὶ πάντα ἅ διησάφησας ἡμὶν πρὸς τὸ μανθάνειν ταύτην τὴν καλλίστην γλῶτταν... ἀλλὰ ἐδόκει μοὶ ὅτι τάχα σὺ ἄν εἴπες ὅτι τὰ βιβλία τάδε A Greek Boy at Home Athenaze οὐκ μὲν εἰσὶν ἐκ τοῦ παλιοῦ χρόνου, ἀμφότερα δὲ γεγραμμένα ἦσαν ἔναγχος. καὶ κατὰ τὴν ἐμὴν γνώμην, ὁ διάλεκτος τῆς ἑλληνικὴν γλῶσσαν τοῦ Ὁμήρου διαφέρει πολὺ ἤ διάλεκτος Κοινός. Ἀλλὰ ἀξιόλογον πάν ὅ ἔλεγες περὶ τῆς νεοελληνικῆς. Εὐ λέγεις!

Sooo...If I learn Modern Greek and speak it with Attic grammar, everyone in Greece will have no trouble understanding me. (Like they all know the aorist infinitive and its application?)

If you want to converse/practice with someone who can speak AG to some degree (few years of practice), send me a message.

Are you still in some of these Koine Greek groups?

It is hard to develop fluency in a literary language. You can become fluent in modern Greek. Remember in ancient Greek you are dealing with texts from about 700bce to 200ce. That is 900 years. There is a lot of variation in the textual material.

If modern greek is your mother tongue or if you achieve a mother tongue level of modern greek, then you might get at least some elementary fluency in ancient greek if you study a lot of ancient greek and have fluency as your target. Possibly not the only way of achieving this but definitely one that is checked. The most interesting thing is that after studying ancient greek for some years the phrases that indicate the onset of fluency emerge naturaly i.e. instead of saying something in modern greek you just find yourself quite amused to having said that in ancient greek.

I was in Greece last week, they said they didn't understand any ancient Greek. A guy showed that on RU-vid as well. So I'm skeptical that learning Greek will help much.

Hey ! I have Xenophons Anabasis ! Also have you seen Boris Johnson recuting the Illiad ?

Gert Mink

To learn Ancient Greek and Latin first you should learn Illyrian and Pellazgian languages. The reason is that: Both languages mention above are based on the Illyrian and Pellasgian languages (Albanian) today) as the first one. On Greece and Italy majority of ancient populations were Albanian. As per that reason both Greek and Latin are build of a grammar which is a combination of Illyrian Pellasgian and Hellenic. Also with Latin (Etruscian).

Do not let anyone tell you that you cannot learn something to whatever level you want. All it takes is effort and time. I think it worth noting that 'fluent' not a useful concept here. Can you use the language for the purpose you are interested in? For example, I am interested in reading Latin and Greek with little-to-no recourse to a dictionary. I am not interested in having a chat in latin about how my day went or ordering food from a restaurant in spoken Latin - does that mean I would not be 'fluent'? If I can read De Rerum Natura and understand it about as well as if I just read the English translation, I will be content - whether someone else says I am fluent or not. On the other hand, I am also learning French, and am at about A2-B1 (see CEFR), I can 'get around' as it were in French, read news articles, listen to TV - though I don't catch everything and certainly not subtleties, I generally understand the gist of it. With only a little more study and effort, I can make it to a confident B1 - which is all that is required by the French government to immigrate; a little more and I can get to B2, which would be enough to work at almost any job in France (subject to some specific vocabulary for the industry and, of course, being otherwise qualified for the job). But - I would still not be able to talk about _anything_, I would have to expand my vocabulary a lot and read a lot to be as fluent in French as I am in English. (Ah there - 'fluent as' it works well as a _comparative_ rather than an _absolute_ term). No-one will be as fluent in any of the varieties of ancient Greek as the native speakers were - but _anyone_ can be as fluent as they need to be to read original source material directly; it just takes time and effort. I would expect 2 years of regular study to really get most of the vocabulary down, maybe another year to get vocabulary to the point you want it - different works may require variations - Koine (New Testament) is not Attic (Plato, Euripedes) is not Ionian (Herodotus) is not Homeric (Illiad and Odyssey) - there are variations in spelling, pronunciation, minor changes to grammar, and (at least in the case of Homeric Greek) some specialized vocabulary. But - all it takes for that is more work, paying attention to critical annotations from previous study (available as footnotes in many critical editions).

I think I'd disagree with learning modern greek, as the words change meaning over time

1. The Greeks learned Ancient Greek to where they could haggle in fish markets and argue philosophy. 2. Many Romans learned to speak Koine Greek and had their kids learn it. 3. Renaissance scholars could speak Ancient Greek to their colleagues from other countries. 4. Graduates from the Polis Institute (among others) can go for days speaking Ancient Greek with each other. Tell them that you can’t learn it. (Only you’ll have to learn Ancient Greek to do it because many Polis graduates don’t speak English.-That’s why the classes are conducted only in Ancient Greek!)

Hey Dane, if you want to meet online, read some Greek text together and converse in Koine Greek, I am willing.

Did James White buy out all the TBS Leather Greek Textus Receptuses???? #kjvonlycontroversy

I disagree that it's pedagogy at the root of not being able to "read" the ancient Greek after a few years of study. I mean you would have the same with REAL texts with the natural method. Yes, I have a PhD in classical languages, was taught in the traditional method, have been doing Greek for twenty five years, and have been doing spoken ancient Greek for the past two years. I also can speak and read modern languages, such as Japanese, and it just takes time. I still struggle with reading texts despite all this, and I have taught it for decades. Students struggle with Greek (and Japanese). They are harder. I wonder how many classes of "normal" undergraduates he's taught. He mentions he "doesn't believe" that the language is any more challenging than other languages. He's also looking at the BEST students of the language when he talks about those chats. I have friends who have studied both language as living ones for years, and they still struggle with challenging prose texts. And, I can read koine NT Greek pretty easily with the old grammar method decades ago.

The Jews revived Hebrew, which was a dead language, I don't see what ancient Greek cannot be revived.

Greek grammar... lots of fun.🤥

hey guys all of you calm down..... first of all you must learn modern Greek, this is my opinion, and after that you will learn easier than before ancient Greek. λοιπόν παιδιά ηρεμήστε όλοι σας. πρώτα από όλα και αυτή είναι η δικιά μου γνώμη πρέπει να μάθετε τα νέα ελληνικά και μετά πολύ πιο εύκολα θα μάθετε και τα αρχαία ελληνικά.