Good Beginner
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I used this book about 15 years ago and, at the time, it was just what I needed. I had tried learning Greek using the Teach Yourself volume, but found that it was a bit too stodgy - too much grammar early on and, most importantly for me, only short sentences to translate and no reading passages. I tried at different times to get into it, but didn't make much progress. Then I found this and thought I'd give it a go. It was right up my street - I got into the reading passages straight away and felt that I was moving along nicely. And the two volumes are ok - text in one and grammar and vocabulary in the other, so you can have both open at the right page and there's no flicking backwards and forwards. I know different people have said that it's badly arranged, but you do get to read Greek from the start and that's what you want.
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Fumbly. Very fumbly.
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Words simply cannot describe how stupid it is to have text in one book and vocabulary in another. Greek's hard enough to learn in the first place without that extra obstacle. It's as if the editors actually WANTED to make learning Greek more difficult. If each extract were laid out with a facing vocabulary, it would allow the reader to pick up the vocab at speed, getting through more Greek quicker, as per the title of the entire thing, 'Reading Greek'. How can you actually read any bloomin' Greek if you're constantly flicking between two books in the most indescribably fumbly and infuriating manner?
But 'unapproachable' is the watchword for the entire series - it's not just the nonsensical 2-book system. Everything - new grammar, new vocab, new concepts - is introduced at the wrong time. Most of the vocab is absolutely useless for the beginner, with really fundamental words being introduced far later than you'd expect, and pretty pointless ones relatively quickly. The incredibly unappealing presentation of the entire thing, compounded with the infernally dull content and passages, makes the process of learning the language tedious, dull and uninspiring.
Jones occasionaly drops in a really patronizing joke ("you will be thunderstruck to learn..."), but not often enough to justify it as the book's style (as is the case, for example, with CGP books). The comments merely look out-of-place and stupid in a book that otherwise preaches no friendliness or approachability whatsoever, and whose presentation, far from casual or colourful, has the feel of nothing other than a legal document. The grammar tables in particular are simply horrific: new endings etc. are actually printed over a shaded/dotted background, so that you'd even struggle to make them out properly if they were English letters!
Utterly disasterous, and really renders the study of the beautiful language that is Greek far more painstaking and unexciting than it need be. Amazed it hit the market.
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A good character-building exercise
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The content is boring, the vocabulary to be learnt is irrational, grammar is introduced at random points, and the layout is, as the Greeks say, kakistos. Really, who thought that it would be a good idea to have one book of text to read, and a separate one with the vocabulary and grammar. Would it have been so hard to put them in the same book, text on on side, vocabulary on the other? Imagine putting an introduction and footnotes to a text in a different book: crazy! If you are taking one of the many courses requiring you to use this book, you don't really have a choice; at least when you have finished you will earn the epithet "polytlas" (having suffered much). If you are working on your own, or are a teacher wondering which text to choose, use Greek to GCSE (even if you are not doing GCSE). It is superior in every respect. The flimsy material from which Reading Greek is made renders it useless even for propping-up table legs.
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Disappointed
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I am currently using this textbook in my university degree and am very disappointed in it indeed. Having studied from a Latin Grammar and Text book published by the University of Cambridge Press I was expecting much more from the Greek book. The vocab is not divided into Verb, Noun, Adjective etc, but is only listed in alphabetical order, very confusing for someone with no Greek knowledge at all. I would not reccommend this book to any new reader of Greek and would advise them to look elsewhere. The layout is messy and the grammar is poorly organised.
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excellent and very complete
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I have been using that textbook to learn ancient Greek on my own.. and this is an excellent one. Reading Greek is easy to use, a bit intimidating at first as it is all in black and white and does look like an old classical study text book.. but I must tell you that it is by far the best textbook for learning Greek I ve been looking at so far, along with John Taylor "Greek to GCSE" in 2 volumes.
Like the serie "Reading latin", "Reading Greek" consists of 3 separate books. this volume, one with all the Greek texts that you ll study and the self study guide, that doies explain per chapter some tricky grammatical points and also contains all the keys to the numerous exercises the textbook offers you.
The course is pleasant to use, and before you know it, things settle down, and you're then amazed by what you ve been able to learn and master...
Greek is by far easier to learn than latin, but it does require some work at the beginning, specialy if you're not very good in English grammar, and I must say that this course make the task easy..
I really like it and does recommend it to every one willing to be able to read Demosthene. Plato or Sophocle without translation
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