Customer Reviews

An Independent Study Guide to Reading Greek

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Designed to be used in conjunction with the "Reading Greek" series. Gives answers to problems and translation notes. Excellent for self-study for someone who has had some training in a foreign language (esp. Latin), or has occasional access to a Greek teacher.

"Reading Greek" was first published in two volumes: the TEXT and the GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY AND EXERCISES. "An Independent Study Guide to Reading Greek" was subsequently published to patch up the shortcomings of the original volumes (which could not be easily reprinted with corrections because they are so interrelated). The authors - a committee - admit that even teachers of Greek found the original volumes quite difficult to follow. The original explanations are too brief; reference material is scattered throughout the text; and the typography is poor (with some very small Greek fonts, and badly organized headings and subheadings).
If your school or university has prescribed "Reading Greek" - you wouldn't buy it otherwise - you are, unfortunately, part of a captive market and you really need to buy "An Independent Study Guide to Reading Greek" as well to make sense of the course.

If you are using JACT's Reading Greek to learn Greek, you need this book. I wholeheartedly reccomend this series, as it is the best reading method Greek series I could find.

Since I took a year of Greek in college, I'm not so much learning Greek as getting reacquainted. But I took the class ten years ago, so naturally, I had forgotten lots.

I started by reviewing the first chapters in Reading Greek, but I quickly realized that I needed more than just what the text and grammar/exercise book could supply together.

Luckily this book exists. It's design for each chapter really helps. First it presents some words and phrases which might be a bit sticky--I check here before I even try to read a new section. Then I read the Greek section in the text. Then I come back to the Independent Study Guide, check the English translation section to see if I understood what I read. And I am faring much better now.

This course package is rather nice and still the most comprehensive, compact, well-rounded and historically-oriented, well-balanced introductory greek course. BUT IT IS ONLY FOR STUDENTS WHO CAN STUDY ON THEIR OWN AND KNOW HOW TO HELP THEMSELVES (E.G. READ A GRAMMAR GUIDE)
Having studied Latin with Reading Latin by CUP, I found this course to be somewhat less sophisticated. I would still choose this course over any other course available with English as an instructional language, it is profound, unpretending, the linguistics side is solid, the stories interesting and neither too light nor too long. Combining the text book and the grammar/exercise book into one compendium would improve the usability of the course. I also recommend that more exercises be added in the next edition. A better layout would also help, including larger font size. Still a best buy. The selection of texts is one of its strong points: not everyone who studies Greek wants to delve into Mythology, insurance fraud is a real life topic, here packaged in a very funny, capturing story. If you learned Russian and remember the story of the Marsman in the GUM, here are more stories that will stay in your memory for a long time.