Introduction to Greek

by Cynthia W. Shelmerdine

Introduction to Greek, Second Edition is an introductory text to Classical Greek. It is designed for the first full year course and it concentrates on the basics in a way that allows the material to be covered easily in courses that meet three times a week over the course of two semesters. The focus of the text is on grammar with slightly altered readings drawn chiefly from the works of Xenophon and Herodotus.

Genres: Language, Textbooks, Nonfiction

332 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2008

About the author

Cynthia Wright Shelmerdine is an American classicist and archaeologist, known for her researches into Mycenaean culture and history. She is Robert M. Armstrong Centennial professor emerita at the University of Texas, Austin.

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here I go, auditing a Classical Greek class at the University of Utah.

Reading of this book goes on hold until Fall 2019 semester. Instead of taking the spring semester of Classical Greek I am taking modern Greek to get a better feel for the language, then back to the classical side in the fall. The modern Greek class has far less grammar and more conversation, which gives me a better feel for the language.

...

Instead of taking the second semester, I moved away from Salt Lake City, so I am marking this book read as of the date when the first semester ended.

[Nihlah Assegaf · Rating 4 out of 5]

JUST DID MY FINAL EXAM
OK OVERALL INSANELY DIFFICULT EXPERIENCE BUT ALSO VERY FUN AND VERY WORTH IT - OFF TO INTERMEDIATE!!! CANT WAIT TO READ ACTUAL PLATO NEXT SEMESTER

[max · Rating 3 out of 5]

I used this book in a 14 week summer Independent Study in 2012 with a young lady from a nearby town who wanted to learn a year's worth of Greek before she went off to college.. It is not the usual book I use for introductory Attic Greek (that being Athenaze). I chose it after carefully vetting several other recently published introductory Greek textbooks because I liked the clean, uncluttered presentation. I also liked the way the author has dispensed with a lot of the technical linguistic information that unfortunately finds its way into many introductory Greek texts, as well as wordy explanations for why certain forms look the way they do -- another drawback of first year texts.

This is the second edition, copyright 2008. The layout is quite attractive, with the usual morphological paradigms nicely laid out from chapter to chapter. The book contains clear and easy to understand explanations of important grammatical concepts such as indirect discourse and the functions of participles.

It also has good exercises, including both Greek to English and English to Greek sentences for translation, occasional exercises where individual verb forms must be parsed, and excellent longer passages of connected prose, mostly adaptations from Herodotus. It offers relatively early on a number of different genitive, dative, and accusative case usages and makes good use of a variety of common Greek idioms in the exercises.

Big drawback: The extended reading passages, excellently adapted and very important to beginning students, do not have separate vocabulary under the text. Where many of the words in the reading have nowhere else appeared in the book, students are left to look these words up -- a time consuming endeavor that could be easily eliminated with a straightforward running vocabulary.

[Valerie Blackburn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fair introduction to the Greek language. Having only studied English and French prior to this, I found the language very poetic.