Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners

such as the one at greekgeek dot org. Also from time to time a new study group for this book will start, on the forum/message board of textkit dot com.

This is an excellent way to learn classical Greek. It takes you straight to unsimplified Homer within a few lessons and if you tough it out you can end up able to read Homeric Greek quite well. It works fine as a teach-yourself book. I had had a semester of Greek many years ago, but I was essentially starting from scratch. Each lesson provides the vocabulary for a few lines of Book I of the Iliad and sends you to the reference grammar at the back of the book to learn the grammar incrementally. Early on there are some prose sentences in Homeric Greek to translate, but these go away in later lessons. Once you have finished the book you will have read all of Book I and will be ready to continue through all of Homer (with a lexicon). My only gripe is that a few more prose sentences to illustrate the grammar points by repetition would have helped a bit. Overall a great teach yourself book.

I learned ancient greek before I bought this book, so I can't speak to how well it serves someone just learning the language. Basically, I was a few years out of school and wanted to refresh my Greek. It really served me well, and actually gave me a better mastery of Homer's language than I ever had in college. I highly recommend it to anyone. I would say to beginners that Homeric Greek is the correct approach to learning ancient Greek: first, starting with Homer is a better foundation for learning later dialects than vice versa; second the Iliad (and Odyssey) introduces a beginner to characters, themes, phrases, and other allusions that fill nearly all later Greek literature to some extent; third, the Iliad is simply a damn good story that reads even better in the original. Expand your experience.

Some may not like Pharr's approach to teaching a heavily-declined language like Greek. In each chapter he presents a set of common Homeric vocabulary words. Afterwards as an exercise the student must translate various sentence permutations containing the vocabulary from Greek-English and vice-versa. It may seem at times boring. However, it is effective. After the fourth chapter I began to easily recognize case endings with minimal difficulty. Very effective. I wish I had learned Latin in such a way.