Customer Reviews

From Alpha to Omega, An Introduction to Classical Greek, Rev Third Edition

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a first year Greek student I base my opinion of this text not on my expertise in the language but on my use of the text itself.

I have no complaints about the content of the text; it seems reasonably paced and thoughtfully developed.

My two critiques (I hope contructive in anticipation of the 4th edition)are thus:
1. The text still contains typos (including within the Greek paradigms) that I am surprised to find in a third edition.
2. The formatting of paradigm tables (particularly in the appendices) leaves something to be desired. The content is complete but they could be laid out better. I suspect that formatting has been compromised for the sake of space. My own opinion (speaking chiefly as a spreadsheet fanatic) is that it would be worth killing a few more papyri for the sake of tables that are intuitive to look at. I would gladly incur the necessary extra cost.

I recommend this text but sincerely hope a 4th edition is in the works.

"From Alpha to Omega" is an introduction to the classical Greek of Athens (Attic). I'm using it in conjunction with Pharr as I attempt to study Homeric Greek. There are some differences in the dialects, but I like Groton's text because it provides explanations that are relevant to Homer's Greek, and I find the layout much easier to navigate than Pharr's. The book is very good either as a primary text in classical Greek or as a companion to a text in Homeric Greek.

This text was recommended to me by a colleague in Classics who loaned me hers. I liked it enough to buy my own. It isn't a perfect text by any means. It is far more detailed than is needed or wanted by most students of Greek, and I'd hate to have to cover the entire thing in two semesters. I have a fairly good language background, but unless I were a Classics major or were taking no other courses, I'd be overwhelmed by it. A teacher who wants to attract students from other majors into a few semesters of Classics should definitely use a different text.

I think Groton's text is very good for the student who has considerable language experience, or the person like me who can't remember the whats of a language without a thorough grasp of the hows and whys. It's also good for the student who wants to continue studying Greek beyond the first year. If your interest doesn't extend beyond a basic course, this text will likely be a frustrating overload.

This text isn't perfect, but it's perfect for me. Whether it's perfect for you depends on your learning style, your language experience, and your expectations for continuing with Greek. Whether it's perfect for you or not, I strongly recommend buying "From Alpha to Omega: Ancillary Exercises" (Jon Bruss) to go with it. Because Groton's text is detailed, so are the ancillary exercises. You don't have to do all of them, but they really will help you understand and remember the material in the text.

Groton has been our class textbook through Greek 100 and, so far, half of Gr 200. At the start we were very enthusiastic about it, especially those of us who learned Latin from Wheelock, but after a while.... The book is similar to Wheelock's Latin, but much less accessible. The layout is dreadful (particularly the appendices). Ms Groton tells us far more than we need (or want) to know about some things: digammas, thematic vowels, quantitative metathesis and so forth. But more importantly, the readings are inadequate and the exercises will drive you nuts: Is it really useful to know how to say "Either have I now made clear who the stranger is, or shall I also announce what name he has?"?

If you are using Groton, get the Ancillary Exercises as well. They're a big help. You might also get the Loeb Xenophon and try to read it with a lexicon. The point after all is to learn to read greek.

I'm in the first year of an additional Classics BA and am taking Greek 1 with this text. I'm expecting an A-/B+. I find the book full of information, but horrible to use. As a former teacher, I would never want my students to use such a poorly designed book. The appendices and diagrams are terribly laid out. I often have to read and re-read multiple pages to find the most important grammar points hidden away and obscured by minute details, resulting in frustratingly long times to find crucial grammatical points. The exercise sentences are ridiculous. Rather than build with a simple foundation and increase the complexity of any particular grammatical point, the book makes overly contrived and convuluted sentences that will likely frustrate and discourage many. Example: "It is not possible, atleast for the students, either to say the long names or to explain the passages."
If you must use this book, the additional exercise book is very helpful and highly recommended.
Overall, I can't deny it is an informative book, but I would not recommend it for use unless there are no better alternatives, or ample time to devote to each lesson. Often the lessons combine to entirely different grammatical points that could easily get there own chapter.
Still, I suspect there must be at least one book out there that is easier to use.

I agree completely with James W. Picht's review from January 12, 2007, and I recommend that you read it. Your opinion of this book is going to depend largely on what you want to get out of it; the distribution of one-star and five-star ratings on this page attests to that. If you want a modern language textbook with pictures and lessons on how to tell how old your brothers and sisters are, then you will give this book only one star. But the thorough grounding in Greek linguistics that this book offers really is a tremendous help for serious study, and if you've looked at other textbooks you'll know that you can't get this detailed a treatment anywhere else, and you'll give it five stars. Sure, it is very difficult to learn Greek, but did you really think that learning to read literature written 2800 to 2300 years ago would be easy?

I used this book as a student for my first two semesters of Attic. It is very detailed and contains a number of good exercises, including translation from English to Attic, Attic to English, and readings that get progressively more difficult (and also more interesting).

The biggest complaints that I have with the book are:

1) No real review of the relevant parts of English grammar. For a Classics major or for someone with a good language background, this isn't as much of a problem. For others, however, this can make understanding the material very difficult. Trying to remember the exact function of relative pronouns, demonstrative adjectives, participles, etc is not something immediate for most people, and often the accompanying examples in the book are a bit shallow.

2) The layout is dreadful, especially in the appendices. The paradigms for nouns and verbs are difficult to read, and it would not be hard to improve these dramatically.

3) The book often overwhelms readers with far too much information. For someone already familiar with the basic concepts, this additional information is extremely helpful, especially in understanding why certain verb forms evolved into their current forms. To a beginner, however, it is hard to know which material is there simply to be helpful and exploratory, and which information is crucial for understanding the language. Early students will definitely get bogged down in the beginning trying to distinguish between the two.

At the end of the day, the book is still very worthwhile. You will learn the language and it is an extremely good reference afterwards. Hopefully future additions of the book will address its drawbacks.

I just finished two semesters of this book and it was by far the best language textbook I have ever had the pleasure of learning from! Ancient Greek is a very difficult language to learn, even more so than Latin in my opinion, but having plowed through all 50 of these chapters, I feel very confident about confronting the grammar of any unfamiliar Greek text and I can't wait to continue my studies. While I can't compare this to any other Greek textbook, I can say from my experiences wrestling with Latin that this book does a far better job of adequately breaking down the language. There is a lot to learn in each chapter, but all the grammatical nuances are certainly covered if you are willing to spend the time learning them. The whole book is very fast-paced, but thorough, and for me that made it all the more exciting when I could look back at earlier chapters and be able to sight-read all the examples!

The only difficulties I had with this book were the sometimes superfluous grammatical depth to certain concepts and the lack of context for the practice sentences. Groton makes frequent notes of obscure grammar usages in other Greek dialects (this book is based on Attic, or "Classical" Greek) or rarely-used Attic wording, which pop up on occasion in the practice sentences. This can get really annoying when you've done all you can to translate a particular phrase and you find out the answer was in a footnote back in the third chapter! Oh well. But this is where the professor helps a lot! Also, the sentences can get really bizzare ("They asked the wisest of the heralds whether the rather old roads were longer than the new roads."). Odd, and while I know the vocabulary was limited (avg. of 15 new words per chapter), you'll probably never come across another sentence like that in real text.

On the whole: excellent layout and a solid introduction to Classical Greek!

I used this text in a college Greek course. I had already learned Greek in high school, and so was spared some of the pain inherent in it. Had I not studied Greek beforehand, I probably would have ripped the book in half out of sheer frustration. Groton lays out the information in her text in what I have dubbed the "this...and now this!" format. Often, two successive points in a chapter will have no relation whatsoever. Furthermore, once you reach the more complex points of grammar, Groton seems concerned only with shoving as much information as possible onto a single page, without any mind for adequately instructing one in the finer uses of a grammatical topic ( Cf. participles).

If that doesn't doom the text for the dumpster, the conjugation lists and exercises merit every copy's being thrown into a roaring incinerator. Rather than providing morphological exercises that allow you to recognize verbs in various persons, numbers, tenses, voices ( like Mastronarde), Groton chooses to use ridiculous and trite exercises. Consequently, you spend hours writing 5 Greek sentences, if only because Groton provides first-person-singular forms of the verbs and nothing more. Come test time, you don't recognize the third-plural-aorist-passive-indicative form of "To receive," given that Groton never used it. Of course, whether you recognize even the first-person form is doubtful, given the awful format of the conjugation lists. Groton crams as many verbs as possible onto the page, not in alphabetical order and without English translations. You can try the appendices and the glossary,but both are as dreadful as the text itself. If this text is used in your Greek course, I would strongly recommend a collection of conjugated Greek verbs or verb flashcards. If you're an autodidact, buy Mastronarde's text and a good Greek read. If you've already bought the text, I suppose there's always Goodwill.

This book was my first introduction to the language. It is a good mix of reading selections (which grow in size and complexity as you progress), vocabulary, and blurbs in English about the function of the language. The exercises given in each chapter exhasperate and delight as you realize that you are translating a sentence which reads, "Hurry, O Goddess! They hasten out of their tents and into the ocean." Or, "Pay heed, O Lady of the house! The letters are on the couch!"

Ever wonder how to decline "Socrates"?

This book is best if you have a good sense of humor. The one thing it is not very helpful with is accentuation. It does explain the topic, but it's explanation is quite poor.

I am a college junior who is taking Ancient Greek as her foreign language in a public university.

This book is the textbook for my first semester learning the language, and I could not be happier. The book is very easy to navigate, and has resources in the back that make studying much easier than it otherwise would be. Groton was successful in putting together a textbook that covers a vast amount of information in an easy-to-understand formats, and while there is a LOT of information covered, it is divided into smaller, easy to learn chapters that do not give too much information at once.

The back of the text book contains both Greek-to-English and English-to-Greek dictionaries of all words covered in the textbook, individual vocab lists for each chapter, and charts for each declension and conjugation learned. Although I personally would be hard-pressed to pick out many errors in the Greek text, there are little to no errors within the English portions and my very-well-qualified professor claims this book is one of the best he has worked with thus far.

We have only gone through chapter 24 thus far and will be continuing through the book next semester, but I am extraordinarily pleased with the ease with which I have been able to learn from this book. Learning Ancient Greek is no piece of cake -- in truth, it is the most difficult course I have ever taken -- but it is truly worthwhile and I have become a regular Greek-geek. I cannot imagine trying to learn the language without Groton's book, and will undoubtedly treasure it long after the course is done.