A Year of Greek

     I have finished Hans-Friedrich Mueller’s Greek 101 course in Homeric Greek, through the Great Courses series. It’s supposed to be a two-semester course, but it took me two and a half years to get through the thirty-six lessons and their exercises, since I was moving at my own pace and enjoying myself. I immediately started a review, which I hope to finish in a couple of months rather than years. The course includes a half-hour video of Mueller (who teaches Classics at Union College in Schenectady) presenting the material for each lesson, and in the handbook supplied with the DVD or download there are morphology exercises for each lesson, translation of sample sentences from Greek to English and English to Greek, some short koiné or common Greek translations from the New Testament, and, after the first dozen lessons, translation from the Iliad—five or six lines to scan and translate in each lesson, so that by the time you’re through, you’ve translated about 130 lines of the Iliad. Fred is a good, entertaining, often funny teacher and an interesting fellow—I’ve corresponded with him by email—and he follows the general approach in the classic textbook Homeric Greek for Beginners written by Clyde Pharr and revised by others over the years. I’d give myself a solid B- for the first semester. For the second semester, I think I’ll be kind to myself and say I changed my status to auditor. But I expect to do better in reviewing the second half.