[.ca] Ancient Greek Alive (ISBN 080784800X)

A Blast and a Half:
As I am actually learning with this book from one its co-authors (Dr. Catherine Freis) this very semester, I perhaps have a different feel for the book than someone just ordering it would have. Nonetheless, it is a wonderful manual: easy to follow, with plenty of charts, stories, and practice sentances for people who learn differently. It is, however, more of a classroom book than a "teach-yourself" book, since the first several lessons are to be learned he listening and repeating. However you can get tapes made by Dr. Fries to practice with for the first lessons by writing her e-mail address. Also, the stories are, in my opinion, the best part of the book. Collected from all around the world and translated into Attic Ancient Greek (the Greek of Socrates, Plato, and other Athenians), they are all /very/ amusing.

Great For The Second Time Around (Or For Class):
Some reviewers below tell of their disappointment with this book as a manual for self-study. I feel their pain; the book teaches Greek like you might teach Spanish, with lots of activities relying on repetition and reading and constructing sentences by analogy. So if you know no Greek at all and want to learn it, don't start here. But if you want to re-learn your Greek from school, or refresh the Greek you learned from some other (more self-teaching friendly) book, _Ancient Greek Alive_ is great. Because it teaches Greek like a living language, there's more emphasis on colloquial Greek than you typically find in a textbook on Attic. You get a much better sense of the meaning of the little words, for instance. Paradoxically, this better prepares you for reading, for instance, Plato, who wrote in dialog form and whose characters do not declaim sentences like you might find in, for instance, Mastronarde. The chapters are digestible in size. The writing is accessible and clear, and not encumbered by too much technical grammatical terminology early on. The readings are entertaining and accessible, combining progressively longer quotations from ancient Greek sources with folktales from various sources and the adventures of Sheik Nasrudin translated into Greek. Informative interludes introduce famous Greeks, aspects of Greek culture and the history of the Greek language. Hard to beat.

For classroom only:
I am not quite sure how to rate this book. It may be five stars in a classroom. It was obviously written with a classroom in mind and an instructor who is committed to using this book as the primary text. There are scripts for spoken dialogues for exchanges between student and teacher and student and student. I can certainly see the benefit of learning the sound of Greek, and I was really looking for something that would help me with pronunciation. This is not that book. It is really not a book for the autodidact.

Ancient Greek Alive:
I have studied New Testament Greek for a number of years, Nevertheless, this book was a disappointment to me because there was no English translation of the conversational texts. Moreover, only a small selection of the words from the conversational texts were listed in the vocabulary. Besides that, the format of the book was an unattractive mess. On the positive side, the book has great potential for a thorough revision that might include 1. a reformatting to impart a neat, pleasant, professional look to the book, 2. a complete vocabulary in each chapter with English equivalents, and 3. an English translation of the conversational texts. The missing information is frustrating for a language-learner and causes the learner to depend inordinately on the help of a teacher.

A funny approach to teaching ancient Greek:
This ancient Greek manual is different from others currently available on the market in that it offers the student a lot easy reading material right from the start, mostly in the form of humorous stories about "Nasreddinos", a wise fool from the Iranian literary tradition. There are also lots of famous quotes from the New Testament and from Greek authors at the back of the book. I have been using this book as an auxiliary manual, my main manual being William D.Mounce's grammar of NT Greek. The reason why I didn't start learning Greek with this book is because it is clearly not meant for people who want to study Greek on their own. The book opens with a series of easy dialogues to be used in the class-room. No translation is provided since the teacher is supposed to be there. This quite abrupt introduction put me off completely and I started looking elsewhere. Another downside is the overall presentation, which is quite messy. Some pages clearly suffer from an overload of information and look like a real jungle. Having digested he main points of Greek grammar thanks to Mounce's remarkably clear and scientific exposition, I have come back to this book for its charming little stories. Another interesting feature of this manual is the addition of notes and remarks about linguistics, history and culture, as well as judicious study hints. Nevertheless, if you are planning to learn Greek on your own, I advise you to learn Koine Greek first and buy Mounce's remarkable books. Start with his grammar (don't forget to buy the workbook, it is great!).