Greek 101: Learning Ancient Greek by Speaking It (Lesson #6)

This will be a meetup series unlike any that David and Philip have done before. Starting on Monday October 7, we will be learning Ancient Greek by speaking it (as well as writing it and reading it). In other words, we will be learning ancient Greek just like we would learn a living language.

We will not exactly be using a book but will instead be using this video series by Prof. Hans-Friedrich Mueller, Greek 101:

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/greek-101-learning-an-ancient-language

The video course does come with a booklet, so in that sense there will be a book that people will consult during the meetup.

Please note that Hans-Friedrich Mueller's covers both Classical Greek and Biblical Greek.

Accessing Materials

Many of you will have access to this course for free through your public library (if your library provides a service called Kanopy). For example if you live in Toronto or Ottawa you can access this course for free. (Links to the Toronto Public Library and the Ottawa Public Library.)

If not, perhaps you have friends whose public library does have Kanopy and who will share their public library access with you.

Lastly, the course does go on sale for roughly $50 USD quite frequently. Check the link above every few weeks to see if it goes on sale.

About the Meetings

Please note that neither Philip nor David currently know Ancient Greek. So this meetup will be a language course without a teacher. Philip and David will guide the flow of the meetup as hosts typically do, but the only teacher we will have is Hans-Friedrich Mueller who did the video lecture series that will be our text. And of course we will all be teachers to each other.

Each time we get together we will cover one lesson from the video course. The video series has 36 lectures, so the meetup will last for 36 get-togethers (however long that takes). If that pace proves to be too quick, we will consider slowing things down a little bit and spending two sessions on some of the harder video lessons.

If we still have a few (dedicated!) people left in the meetup by the time we are finished with the video course, we will think about reading an ancient Greek work together (possibly Plato's Republic in the original Greek). Wouldn't it be wonderful to read Plato's Republic in the original Greek!

We are sure this is abundantly obvious to everyone, but each participant will have to do a lot of learning on their own. Please be realistic about this. Languages do not learn themselves; you have to work at it.

When we get together, we will be practicing what we have learned on our own throughout the week. Many philosophers end up learning a lot of Ancient Greek words, and for many purposes this might be all you need. We mention this so that no one is misled: This will not be a meetup where we just learn a bunch of ancient Greek words. If that is what you want, Philip would be happy to recommend some excellent books that list and describe a lot of Greek words that philosophers need to know.

Learning some philosophically significant Greek words is a great goal to have, but it is not our only goal in this meetup. In this meetup we will be learning ancient Greek as a language we will speak and read and write. And that means learning all aspects of the language (including the grammar) well enough that we can read Greek without a handy translation by our side and speak Greek without too much hesitation.

Please note that the schedule is a little bit different from what you have come to expect from David and Philip's meetups.

1. Starting on Monday October 8, this meetup will happen once per week, every week.....except
2. Frequently we will not meet on the last Monday of the month.

There are a lot of opinions and debates about how ancient Greek was actually pronounced. We will not be engaging in any of these debates in this meetup. In this meetup we will simply adopt Hans-Friedrich Mueller's way of pronouncing Greek.

Lastly, learning a language with other people is enormously fun and we expect that this meetup will be a huge amount of fun!