 This is the third video in a series about ancient Greek that I'm doing This video is about the materials That I think are good. I could talk about the materials. I think are bad, but there's no point to that I'll focus on what I think is good This is learn ancient Greek. It is a book by Peter Jones It is a collection of newspaper columns and Teaching you just a little bit of ancient Greek give you a flavor for what it's like If you go through this book, you will not have learned ancient Greek. You'll just learn a Taste of it Jones is very good. He's funny in a very dry English way, and I appreciated his humor. He Has carefully selected some texts so that you can read through some real Unadapted ancient Greek and feel like you've learned something flip through this book a little bit He introduces the Greek alphabet And I apologize for the lighting, but it kind of is what it is here. There are some cartoon illustrations He teaches you basic grammar And he has exercises in Greek. This has a whole paragraph in Greek It gives you cultural notes gives you more Readings from ancient Greek as you can see there's two whole paragraphs of ancient Greek, but what's really nice about this is that He gives you the answers to so then that way you can see just how much you really did Get out of this He really does To my mind a nice job of presenting ancient Greek So that it's accessible for anyone that doesn't want to sink a whole lot of time into it But still wants to Get an idea what it's like he's Really good. I would recommend virtually anything that has his name on it easily available from amazon.com or directly from Duckworth the publisher and that's learn ancient Greek Now if you want to get into learning Greek for real you're going to need to step up to something like Athanasae Athanasae has been around for a while it's by Balm and Lowell I also like Gil Lowell's work. I have other books by him in Latin This one's in Greek and he does a good job. He has a To my mind he has a really solid understanding of how to make material accessible and the basic setup in Athanasae is that they're going to give you some vocabulary to learn for each chapter they're going to give you a reading and In some places they're going to give you some extra words Some extra help so that you can read Then after you read you're going to go through and do the grammar explanation Then after that are various kinds of exercises and more reading and more exercises Here are comprehension questions. Here are translating English into Greek all very standard stuff But instead of focusing on a lot of grammar exposition. They give you a lot of Greek To read it's set in ancient Greece so you can get a Little bit of familiarity with the culture, but in case you need more They also have essays written in English about the culture, but as you can see the Focus of it is on the reading of the Greek itself as you progress through the book the readings get more complicated with more vocabulary entries as you gain familiarity with the vocabulary and the grammar becomes more complex as you become familiar with the grammar the biggest drawback to this book is that the Exercises are not answered in the book. So you will need an answer key But it does have a nice English Greek and then this is the Greek English vocabulary in the back of the book. So that's a That's a nice point of this book. But as I said if you want the answers to the exercises You're going to need You're going to need to get the teacher's manual Another nice thing about this book is that it's been around for a while. So there are plenty of used copies kicking about Also available on Amazon.com These next three books that I'm going to put out are all one series This is the joint association of classical teachers Greek course also known as jacked It's called reading Greek. This is the old edition. It is not the new edition My understanding is that the new edition Does something that I really like and I'm going to point out what I really don't like about this and Hopefully the new edition my understanding is that this is all fixed. You will need all three of these books for this course, unfortunately Or fortunately as you see it the the primary focus is the text and What they've done is in each section. They have an English introduction to an adapted Greek text As you can see all of the text or maybe not see depending how good your Computer monitor is and my camera is and all this text is in Greek even the captions on the pictures are completely in Greek There's very little English. There's a little bit of English Introducing each section and they've chopped it up into manageable sections for you and all of this is adapted from various bits of Greek literature and they tell you where they've adapted it from like this one is I think From an account of Plato and then they tell you exactly where but that's over here in the independent guide and then over here You have the grammar vocabulary and exercises and what they've done is Put the this is section 7 vocabulary for section 7a and here's all of the vocabulary And here's the vocabulary for section B and the vocabulary for section C So you need to have two books open. My understanding is that this very ugly feature is fixed in the new edition In that the vocabulary is on the page then after a few sections so this one is 7a, b and c then you move into the Grammar explanation and this one happens to be the genitive case and they go on to explain much about it And more explanation and then you come to the exercises translate from Greek into English Convert verbs into a polite form with the optative Translate more Greek sentences into English and then finally English into Greek and Then a test to see how you've done Unfortunately, there are no answers in the grammar vocabulary and exercises, which is where you need the independent guide To reading Greek and this really is very very good Absolutely have to have this book and make sure you've got the correct Edition of this for the edition of the other books that you are using What it has is a little bit more English introduction It has some notes that explain various tricky features in The section and then a translation of section 3a This is nice because when you're reading if it makes sense you're probably Understanding it the right way, but if you're not if it doesn't make sense you're probably doing it the wrong way However, you can make sense of it and not have a good understanding. So the translation allows you to see Just where your understanding is not so great and where your understanding is better Then they do it again for 3b and 3c 3d and 3f and that finally they give you the answers for all of the Exercises in the exercise book and this is really key. So this allows you to study ancient Greek Completely on your own without a teacher. Don't tell anyone you're doing without a teacher. So this is jacked reading Greek it is very much focused on Reading Greek It'll teach you to read Greek by having you read Greek the third textbook that I used is ancient Greek alive by sapphire and freeze and It's just another approach and each Athanasae and reading Greek and ancient Greek alive Have a slightly different take on what they think is most important and a slightly different take on what vocabulary Vocabulary points are important, but they're all the same in one really important way and that is that they have readings in ancient Greek for you to read because Nothing teaches you how to read ancient Greek better than reading ancient Greek and what they've done is they've modified the Greek so that you Have vocabulary and grammatical It's all graded to what you actually know as opposed to the Unadapted Greek where it just it is what it is. So This book has a really nice feature. It has connected readings in ancient Greek It explains the tricky parts gives you definitions for all the words that you don't know and Then it gives you grammar. Well, the grammar explanations come before the reading But you can reverse it and do it the other way around Where you read first and then get the grammar explanation And it's really nice because they give plenty of Greek examples and they use boxes to show off the important parts, but what I don't like is that it's a bunch of folk tales from Cultures that aren't ancient Greece They aren't even Greece it they've got the Nestrudan tales from Turkey or Iran depending where you want to say he's from and From China and from Sub-Saharan Africa and these are all really wonderful stories and they're fun to read but if I wanted to read those I'd take a class or buy a book about Folk tales and not an ancient Greek textbook, but otherwise it's just very solidly done and I really like it She points out what's What's important by putting in boxes gives you nice readings that get longer and more complicated and they really do mirror Ancient Greek. I can't say enough good about this book except for the fact that you know Here's an Armenian folk tale about the mosquitoes buzz and it's a fun read, but it's not why I want to learn ancient Greek ancient Greek alive by sapphire and freeze solid book But as I said folk tales that aren't ancient Greek And the final entry is going to be very difficult to get a hold of if you are an American Much easier if you're from Europe I got this from Amazon dot FR and this is really wonderful This is by Christophe Rico and he this is coin a Greek the other books I showed you were aimed it at a Greek. This is coin a Greek the Greek of the New Testament and Rico is Going to teach Greek as if it were a modern European language so he has Dialogues in ancient Greek. He teaches you all the grammar terms in in ancient Greek The pages have numbers and then the number is in ancient Greek the exercises are Closes big long dialogues all of this pointing towards the best way to learn ancient Greek is to speak it and Read it and learn it as a whole and that's the best way to learn it and really get a solid handle on coin a Greek So then that way you can Fully get a better understanding of the New Testament, which is ultimately where Rico is pointing his students though Of course, there's all sorts of stuff written in coin a Greek and in Rico is also going to Say that it's good stuff too. I'm sure so I don't want to paint him is saying the only reason you learn ancient Greek Is so that you can read the New Testament He also has a set of good recordings That go with this so you're not stuck out on your own Thinking well, how is this pronounced? Well, no problem Rico gives you a CD with the pronunciation In the back he gives an explanation of all the grammar terms Charts most books have these features he has translations of all of the readings Dialogues from earlier in the book and he has the answers to all the exercises. So it's really quite self-contained However, it's in French not English So this is a problem if you do not speak French or at least have a decent reading skill with French Very solid book. It's kind of a pain to get if you live in the United States, but European People should have a much easier time of getting it It seems to me like this book is more suitable for a classroom than for self-learning But you can beat it into the self-learning hole anyway