How hard would it be to learn Ancient Greek on my own? Has anyone here done this? Do you think I would need to take classes? What materials (books, DVD’s, CD’s, flashcards) would you recommend?
A couple of books I was looking at were:
They have this at my local library so I can check it out before buying.
I found Greek much harder to pick up than Latin, but that may have as much to do with the way the two languages were taught. Definitely plan on spending a lot of time memorizing vocabulary.
I made a study of New Testament Greek, which was fairly easy — mainly because the vocabulary was limited. I’m sure the books I used at the time are out of print or out of date by now. But my approach was to buy a basic primer teaching the alphabet, pronunciation, and simple grammar; then a more intermediate book on grammar; and finally the Greek text of the New Testament itself. You could substitute whatever particular work(s) you’re interested in and take the same approach. The time frame, from first opening a book to beginning translating the book of John was about nine months for me.
It depends on how proficient you really want to be. To be able to read classical Greek comfortably will take more than a small amount of discipline. There is a heavy morphological load in the beginning that can be very dull to get through. You have to keep convincing yourself that the end result will be worth it as you wade through innumarable verb paradigms
To ne honest, I would suggest that you take classes. It is less a matter of intelligence than of discipline: having to prepare homework and for quizzes and tests provides the necessary rigor. Otherwise it is very easy to slack and lose everything you have learned so far.
Take classes. Even with class, expect it to be very hard. New Testament Greek is easier, but it is better to learn ‘Classical’ first, beacuse NT Greek will not be much help reading Sophocles, but the other way round will work OK.
I had a friend who taught himself New Testament Greek so he could research Christian history. It took him a couple of years, but he apparently had a working knowledge of it.
Having studied Greek extensively, I’m not sure this is true. Koine (NT Greek) is IMO an excellent introduction to the language, there are numerous modern texts and tools for its study, and the complications of Attic (and Homeric) Greek are not so great that they couldn’t be explained with a footnote or a short review of new grammar (e.g. the more extensive middle-voice forms).
I would also recommend studying Latin first; grammar concepts between the two are comparable enough that IMO Latin students do far better in their approach to Greek than non-Latinists. And like others, I’d recommend something more than simply reading textbooks; you really need a tutor or some support like the on-line Textkit to have a decent shot at getting anywhere.
Would have been easier starting at 12 like I did. It was compulsory at my school and I found it pretty easy, having already done a year of Latin. I took it all the way to University, where I did it on its own (i.e. not as part of a Classics degree). That was 30 years ago. I have forgotten ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING.
I see your point, but for self-study it seems ambitious either way. If the OP’s main goal is to read Attic or 5th century Greek stuff, I think that would be the place to start, ie probably not with Homer or NT stuff. Depends what he’s interested in, I guess.
I definitely agree that Latin first is the way to go (but then I’m biased, being a Latinist and all).
What I would really like to be able to read is The Iliad.
Poetry is tough. I read part of The Odyssey way back when, and that was definitely the hardest thing I had to translate. I think there’s a lot of merit in starting with New Testament Greek and working your way back.
Then you want Homeric Greek (also called Epic Greek), which is an earlier dialect than Attic (dialect of Plato) or Koine (New Testament). It’s alos a little more complex than those dialects.
Learning Greek (especially Homeric Greek) autodidactically can be done, but it’s a grind. There’s a lot of morphology to memorize and you really have to know your grammar. It’s easier if you’ve studied a morphological language (like Latin) before, but it’s still no piece of cake.
I’d suggest finding some beginners’ texts for Homeric Greek (make sure it’s Homeric if you want to read Homer), and make sure you get a work book and work through the practice exercises. Slogging through those exercises is 90% of the work. Basically, you’ll need a certain amont of discipline, you’ll have to spend a couple of hours on it every day and you’ll have to stick with it even when you’re bored stiff.
That stuff is much easier if you have some kind of teacher or tutor to be a task master (and to answer questions), but if you’re a self-motivator, it’s not impossible. Just be advised that you’re probably going to need about a year before you’ll start being able to start reading Homer with decent comprehension (and probably with a lexicon at hand).
The good news is, that once you’ve learned one dialect, the others come much easier (the dialects get simpler as they evolve).
I took an introductory level ancient Greek class, and it was HARD. I can’t imagine learning it on your own unless you have some serious, serious discipline. A lot of it was just rote memorization, which I suck at. I have a friend who studied it pretty seriously in undergrad - he loved the stuff, and even he said it was a bitch.
Good luck. 
This isn’t really true. With decent training in classical Greek, all you need to move to Homer is a taste for hexameters and a copy of Autenrieth. The difference is in some vocabulary and morphology, but by no means is it more complex or even all that different. In many ways it is actually easier if you already appreciate poetry: the units of sense are much shorter than in prose so you don’t get tripped up by complicated periodicity.
And by “morphological” language, I am going to assume you mean “inflected”.
As an aside, people often think they can learn an ancient, inflected language such that they read it with the same ease as they read ordinary English prose. Please don’t have this expectation. Reading an ancient language, especially a work of literature, is always going to be a mediated process. You will get faster, you will have to look fewer items up in dictionaries and grammars, but you will never be able to fly through texts you do not know intimately already. No matter how good you are, construing and decoding always takes time.
There is more than a little merit to beginning your study with something very easy like Koine. It builds up your self-esteem as a reader before it will be brutally worn down by the orators, dramatists, and philosophers. Rather than the New Testament, I would suggest the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum). Personally, I think it makes a more interesting and rewarding read. Athanasius’ Life of Antony is also excellent, though much more classicizing and thus a little harder.
If Homeric Greek is what you’re after, it seems to me there has been more than one “quickie” intro to Greek that focused exclusively on the first 100 or so lines of the Iliad/Odyssey. Not enough to get you anywhere close to competent reading, but enough that you can somewhat puzzle the meaning and glimpse the underlying beauty of the original Greek.
Is anyone aware of texts like these? This site claims to offer books on this; I’m not at all familiar with them, so don’t take this as a recommendation.