help me, obi-wan flist

[bedlamsbard]

Does anyone know of any Attic Greek drill sites like Praxis for Latin? I'm using Shelmerdine's Introduction to Greek; I kind of doubt that there's a cult of Shelmerdine the way there is a Cult of Wheelock, but there aren't practice exercises in Shelmerdine and I, um, less that convinced by my prof. I'll probably end up asking her, but I wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions first. I'm old-school; I need to do a lot of drill to get anything down early on, which is why my first Latin teacher was ideally suited to my language learning temperament.

Comments

[darklyndsea]

Sorry, no help here :( But I'm totally with you on the "Greek textbook not suited to language learning temperament" front. Although, I need to read a lot, not drill.

[bedlamsbard]

My Greek textbook is -- well, not terrible, but it is not ideally suited to my temperament, I'm just saying. The language has been around for a while; surely there's a better book out there than this one?

[darklyndsea]

Not Chase and Philips. Don't get me, wrong, I've had worse language textbooks, but...it reads like Allen and Greenough, which works if you already know what it's talking about but not so much if you're just learning it. And the examples...D: Some of them don't make sense when you translate them right (I assume they're real Greek phrases, but don't they have any normal ones?), so how are you supposed to do the common sense check? And most textbooks start out teaching you normal words- man, woman, cat, dog, boy, girl- but this one starts with, like, deathless. And the present and future tenses are introduced in the same chapter (not that it's that complicated, but still...)

I ordered Reading Greek off of Amazon; hopefully it'll be better. But Greek really looks like it needs some new textbook writers. (if you need drill, there are probably old textbooks up on Google Books/Project Gutenberg)

[bedlamsbard]

*sighs* We've been doing quite a bit of war stuff in this book. Army, march, soldier, general! THEY ALL SOUND THE SAME. (also, Greek, WHY DO YOU NEED BREATHING MARKS? *hiss*)

[darklyndsea]

At least you can have normal sentences with your war words. One of ours translated as 'the word is deathless'. Which, um, who would say that? Why do we need to learn it in first semester Greek?

The breathing marks are working for me, surprisingly enough. It's just, like, "invisible h!" and "visible no-h!", which works for me as long as I remember how it's pronounced. But we skipped over the chapter on the accent marks, so I'm clueless there.

[bedlamsbard]

This is true. We can have normal sentences! Like "The soldier sacrifices to the goddess in Athens." We totally know that.

See, I would probably hate breathing marks and accents less if my prof didn't stop forgetting them. Which is one of the reasons I keep getting worried about whether or not she, you know, actually knows Greek. (I mean, I'm sure she does! She just...doesn't seem that good at teaching it.)

[starlady]

It's not a website, but the supplementary exercises for Alpha to Omega, the textbook my department head wrote, are pretty useful.

[bedlamsbard]

I will look into it. Thank you!

[pinesandmaples]

I only have resources for Biblical/Koine Greek. Sorry.

[bedlamsbard]

Could you toss them at me anyway? I know there are some differences, but it would be nice to have on hand.