Reading Greek: Grammar and Exercises

Reading Greek

by Joint Association of Classical Teachers’ Greek Course

First published in 1978, Reading Greek has become a best-selling one-year introductory course in ancient Greek for students and adults. It combines the best of modern and traditional language-learning techniques and is used widely in schools, summer schools and universities across the world. It has also been translated into several foreign languages. This volume provides full grammatical support together with numerous exercises at different levels. For the second edition the presentations of grammar have been substantially revised to meet the needs of today's students and the volume has been completely redesigned, with the use of colour. Greek-English and English-Greek vocabularies are provided, as well as a substantial reference grammar and language surveys. The accompanying Text and Vocabulary volume contains a narrative adapted entirely from ancient authors in order to encourage students rapidly to develop their reading skills, simultaneously receiving a good introduction to Greek culture.

Genres: Language, Classics, Nonfiction, Linguistics, Textbooks, Reference, Classical Studies

557 pages, Paperback

First published July 30, 2007

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I worked through roughly half of this book as part of the Open University course A275: Reading Classical Greek, and found it to be very good. Greek can look a bit daunting at first with having to learn a new alphabet, but like all language learning, it gets easier with practice. The grammar was explained well, with plenty of exercises and the accompanying Text and Vocabulary book gives you plenty of opportunity to see the various words and grammar rules in action.

I didn't have to complete the whole book for my course, but it is something I would like to get back to at some point to try and complete the rest of the book.

[Ming Chen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, but the explanations are sometimes unclear.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the reading-focused approach, thought it was a very easy way to learn Greek. The presentation of the grammar was so-so. Some topics, I am told, are badly explained. On other topics, you'd expect the book to explain more and give a sense of what is coming in the future. The book introduces the middle voice, for instance, without saying anything about how it is to be translated. And there is not much indication of which paradigms absolutely must be memorized as soon as you learn them, and which are not so important. But for a course it is fine.

There's no table of contents in the grammar which makes things hard to find.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked reading all the greek letters, some of them are kind of obviouse to English letters, and some look really diffrent.

[Koen Crolla · Rating 3 out of 5]

(The suggested entry point for Reading Greek is the Text and Vocabulary book, so that's where my review is.)