Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ideal., 20 Jun 2002
I have the TY book for Ancient Greek and Beginner's Greek Script. I worked through the latter within a couple of weeks and it was a very good introduction to pronunciation, alphabet, and basic vocabulary for contemporary Greek. The former, (the subject of this review), is a much more comprehensive and infinately more advanced text, being very clear about the difficulty of learning Ancient Greek from this book alone. I have conquered the first couple of chapters, and I am very pleased with the direct way that concepts are introduced, leaving the general language jargon up to the reader to learn seperately, (eg, vocative, genitive, nominative... ), but explaining the conditions specifically applicable to the Greek language. I compiled a glossary of approaching 100 terms when working through the first 20 pages or so, as all appropriate key words are used without introduction, (a good thing).
The explanations are excellent and the book seems to achieve it's aim at giving direct explanations in the best possible format to a person prepared to put in a lot of hard work. The frequent interludes of Greek History give the book excellent balance, and the exercises are consistent with the optimal standard of this book, giving lots of opportunity to practice skills such as translating; (for example, the exercise for chapter 2, (of 24 or 25), gives 15 example sentences which each take 20 minutes or so to complete). Overall, this book is very pleasing value for money and is exactly what I hoped for; and is consistent with my opinion that if a subject is hard, it can't be made easier by dressing it up in gimmicks and metaphor, it should be direct and honest like this book.
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not useful for a beginner in Greek!, 12 Mar 2004
By A Customer
This book has good and bad points. It is an excellent and thorough compendium of Ancient Greek, the grammar is excellent and the translations are interesting as well as varied. But, and it is a very big but, it is not really suitable for someone who knows no Greek at all. Everything is chucked at you, without any consideration about what is feasible or not feasible for a normal human being to learn. By the time you get as far as Chapter 11 (that is if you are tough enough to get that far), you will get bogged down with all the endings and confused with the many exceptions etc etc. And, the book is badly bound and falls apart - you will need lots of sellotape. So only one star.
If this book had been properly bound and marketed as, say, "Brush Up Your Ancient Greek", it would have been brilliant. If you have not done Greek before, just get the GCSE books by Taylor - they are far better and I sailed through them happily.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A useful resource, but not a complete course, 9 April 2007
This book may appear to overload the complete beginner with accidence (that is the word endings) and there are many substantial tables of noun declension and verb charts, but the fact of the matter is that these are unavoidable and essential for the comprehension of even the most basic of Ancient greek texts so to ommit or dilute them would be unwise.
This book lacks enough grammatical depth in some instances and focuses heavily of describing the syntax etc. rather than explaining it which may lead to some confusion but to make up for this it provides the reader with a very well-rounded and complete set of vocabulary (particularly for complete beginners) and most of the texts are drawn from original sources.
By the end of the course you are reading original and unadapted texts, which is after all the main reason of studying this ancient language.
If used alongside another course, for example Reading Greek or equivilant, it proves to be a helpful reference tool and alternative to other texts.
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