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Title: Introduction to Attic Greek by Donald J. Mastronarde ISBN: 0-520-07844-6 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: March, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (12 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Terrific second book for self-teaching
Comment: If you simply adore rules of grammar you could begin learning Greek from this book. But you will memorize 57 pages of complicated noun declensions and prepositional phrases before meeting a single Greek sentence--a one-word sentence that means "I see". Most people would do much better beginning with ATHENAZE, which has you read whole paragraphs of simple but correct Greek in a few pages. But you will eventually want to learn grammar more systematically than the immersion method of ATHENAZE allows. Mastronarde loves Greek grammar and his love is almost infectious. He does it in considerable detail from the start, and makes it all more attractive than I'd have thought possible. This book is not a reference grammar, as it does not discuss the many, many variants that actually occur. It is a terrific systematic introduction.

Rating: 4
Summary: Rigorous, effective, thorough, but difficult.
Comment: I have excelled at Greek with this book, and have successfully read Aeschylus, Herodotus, Lysias, Plato, Homer and Euripides. I have found that my memory of forms is quite good due to the rigorousness of this book.

But this is a hard book. True, Greek is a hard language: but this book is quite dry and has a dearth of sentences and a plethora of forms. I appreciate the book now because it has served me quite well (I didn't like it at all at first), but I must confess that learning Greek with this book was a huge chore and not a lot of fun.

So this is the deal. If you are like me, and hated algebra, you might not like this book, because its exercises are algebra-like; but if you stick with it, it will do you good. If you are the sort of strange person that thinks algebra is fun, you will absolutely love this book.

When it all boils down to it, I admire any author who is willing to be as structurally attentive as this one, and who admits that the learning won't be fun, but that you simply have to grind through it. The fun comes later, when you can read Herodotus and Homer with ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM if you just have the patience to get through this book. Your knowledge of Greek will probably be better than your classmates who used a less rigorous introductory textbook. This, I think, is a great compliment to Mastronarde.

Rating: 5
Summary: A Great Book for Attic Greek
Comment: This is a very good book for learning Attic Greek (ie, the dialect of Greek spoken in Attica, a part of Greece, focusing on the classical period, although other periods are also covered), the language of Aristotle, Plato and others. It gives one an extensive vocabulary, and gives a good break-down of grammatical concepts (although that may just be for me, since I had previously learned classical Latin, thus learning the basic concepts and terms, like nominative, indicative, etc.) I highly recommend it, and it keeps its promise: to allow one to read most Greek texts with commentary and dictionary.

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