Simply turning up to the UNCA library on Tuesday to wander through the shelves for a couple of hours seems to have filled me with new life, academically speaking. I found two books that had been misshelved by a row or more (and only checked out one of them). I serendipitously encountered a book on my TBR list, George Steiner’s After Babel, and brought it home with me. I was reminded of the kind of research I want to be able to read (competently, critically), and the kind of research I want to be able to do.

And, not least, I checked out a book which may change the direction of my Ancient Greek introductory graded reader project: Paula Saffire and Catherine Freis’s Ancient Greek Alive. I checked it out for the novelty of the Greek reading material it contained; extremely simple folk tales are part of a healthy diet for language slackers like me. The next day, having read through the nine introductory scripts and the first ten lessons, it struck me: this is the easily the sanest vocabulary progression I’ve ever encountered in a textbook. Very restrained when it comes to nouns: e.g., one learns only μήτηρ & παῖς together in their first story, and the other family nouns you’d expect (πατήρ, ἀδελφός/ή, υἱός, θυγατήρ) are saved for other chapters. Same deal with parts of the body: you get ὀφθαλμός & χείρ quite early, δάκτυλος soon after, but there’s never a frantic attempt to cram in, say, οὖς, κεφαλή, πούς, πρόσωπον, as well. To me, this seems to be the most sensible decision, given how slowly vocabulary is really acquired, and how many other words you need to learn.

Verbs, for example. You need a lot of good verbs to tell any kind of a series of interesting stories, and many of the best verbs for writing beginner stories are irregular. By the end of Script #9, Saffire & Freis have gotten us off to quite a good start: ἀκούω, γιγνώσκω, ἀναγιγνώσκω, γράφω, δακρύω, ἐθέλω, ἐσθίω, ἔχω, κάμνω, λαμβάνω, λέγω, μανθάνω, μεθύω, πίνω, χαίρω, ἐρωτάω, ὁράω, γαμέω, καλέω, νοσέω, ποιέω, φιλέω, βούλομαι, ἔρχομαι, φοβέομαι, δείκνυμι, δίδωμι, εἰμί, εἶμι, κεῖμαι, ἀνίσταμαι, and οἶδα. That is a terrific set of verbs to be working with during the first few weeks of class. Do students know all of them equally well? No, they do not. But they have seen them before and will see them again, because that is a fantastic list from which to plan classroom activities or write extra reading material. I don’t know that you can be properly impressed by the vocabulary review list on p.25 until you’ve spent time with other Ancient Greek curricula. It’s just so–elegant. And sensible. I am a very firm believer in not sheltering students from common irregular verbs until they’ve been at the language for a semester or (worse) almost two: they simply don’t get enough practice time with -μι verbs if you don’t touch them until the year is almost over. No, give them a couple of -μι verbs right from the start, and lots of opportunities to use them.

And the authors haven’t been overly precious about avoiding any kind of verb form for which the students haven’t been given a complete paradigm & grammatical explanation. The 1st & 2nd person plural forms are, I note, exempt from student production for a while. Although this is painful, I can recognize that they are simply not as important for students in either classroom conversation or in storytelling, and sacrifices (temporarily) have to be made. But the teacher’s scripts contain not only all six personal endings and the imperatives a TPR partisan would expect, but also the 1st person plural present active subjunctive. There are also a handful of aorists scattered throughout these introductory scripts, mostly in the imperative & infinitive to contrast aspect, but a handful to indicate past tense (“ἔμαθον τὸ ποίημα”, e.g.). Again, I think all this is healthy for a student. They can (and will) learn to produce and analyze these forms later. But at the very beginning, to be exposed to them in a meaningful context is what they need.

It also hurts a little to have such a tiny set of prepositions (I see ἐπί, ἐκ, & δία listed, and I am fairly certain I remember a glossed ἐν from a later script), but I can recognize this also as a sensible temporary sacrifice. Getting comfortable with personal endings for verbs & case endings for nouns/pronouns should reasonably come first, and internalizing those deserves time. Thankfully, Saffire & Freis have also chosen the path of wisdom in allowing some of their two dozen starting nouns to come from the third declension. Again, students will internalize this if given sufficient space to do so, and it’s better to start them as you mean to go on.

I suspect one of the reasons this book isn’t more popular is the authors' approach to the content of the AG readings: “Being a purist I was unwilling to water down or otherwise distort Greek material. I admired the Greek texts for their beauty and vigor, and did not want to tamper in the least….I went to the children’s library…picking out any stories I thought were funny, intriguing, or both. These I translated into Ancient Greek” (p.xv). Thus AGA’s Ancient Greek readings are mainly “original” Ancient Greek content, which has little or nothing to do with the Ancient Greek world. I more or less share Saffire’s disinclination to simplify authentic texts drastically enough for a first-semester student to be able to read them, which is why I am working on writing my own. Not because I identify as a purist (I don’t); I just think that the texts become less intrinsically interesting after passing through that layer of translation and de-authentication. Once you’re reading an adaptation rather than the real thing, and the satisfaction of touching someone else’s words across the millennia is gone, the adaptation in question needs to be tremendously compelling on its own terms for me to feel any kind of intrinsic motivation to read it.

But AGA also contains a handful of authentic short poetic excerpts to be memorized (Sappho, Archilochus, Mimnermus, Homer, and a couple of Anacreontea), along with a Θησαυρός section at the back of the book, containing brief prose excerpts from the New Testament, Heraclitus, Xenophanes, epitaphs and related snippets (some from Greek tragedians, most from Lattimore’s 1962 Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs), Diogenes, and other famous sayings. This kind of encounter with authentic texts is, I think, far more compelling than an adapted version. I also think that memorizing sentences (in this case, authentic sentences with interesting content) is much more valuable from an SLA perspective than is memorizing vocabulary lists. I think a teacher could do much worse than to ask students to memorize some of the Θησαυρός selections–or perhaps to make artistic posters illustrating them with nice calligraphy. From what I’ve seen of the folk tales so far (through about chapter 10), they are also engaging enough that I would feel I was being reasonable if I asked students to create little illustrated picture books of the stories. This sounds like a small thing. But compare a random Nasrudin story with a random reading from another Greek textbook: do you honestly think that these stories land the same way? The folk tales (again, thus far) have sufficient charm that I would not find my time wasted if I were to read them in any language. The same simply cannot be said of other Greek textbooks.

Of course, there isn’t anything like enough enough Ancient Greek material for students to read in this book. I don’t have an estimate yet, but to put a wild round number on it…maybe ten thousand words total from these readings? Fifteen? I am not certain that it is as high a figure as twenty. And this, mind you, is for a book that’s meant to cover two semesters of Attic Greek. For all the joy of rereading and memorizing–which again, is vastly more plausible for Ancient Greek Alive than for any other AG textbook I’ve laid eyes on–that is still not the kind of input that any student trying to learn to read Greek fast needs. To try and get from zero to large quantities of authentic texts (even the “easy” ones) in a year is an ambitious goal. I don’t think this book alone is likely to get you there.

Nevertheless, the texts in the book are worthwhile (okay, maybe I’ll admit to ambivalence about the skit ὁ ἰατρὸς ἔρχεται), and the sequencing of vocabulary and grammar is almost shockingly sensible. And any teacher who picks up this book is going to have already accepted the major sticking points that I suspect many teachers will encounter with my Ancient Greek reader: namely, that the content doesn’t have enough to do with Ancient Greek, and that they’re just not sold on (or not sufficiently comfortable with) the idea of speaking Ancient Greek in the classroom. “Here’s tens of thousands of words of extra reading for your students to do, relying largely on the vocabulary & grammar that they’ve already learned; they could be doing this instead of (or in addition to) tedious translation exercises or memorizing vocabulary lists & verb paradigms” sounds like a pretty soft sell for the teacher who’s already decided on Ancient Greek Alive as a textbook.

No, the textbook isn’t free–and I suppose that is not quite my original vision. But it is eminently re-usable; you could get by with classroom copies, if you were on a tight budget. It isn’t Koine–which I still tend to think is the most sensible place to start with AG language instruction, since that’s the dialect most of the intermediate-friendly texts are written in. I don’t love the layout, visually, and I am not sure I’m sold on the whole idea of starting with uncontracted verb forms (though I am intrigued). I also prefer macrons in first-semester texts, although I think a competent teacher could get away with genuinely teaching vowel quantities through their pronunciation; that’s probably preferable to cluttering up the text with more diacritics, even if it makes me (not at all a competent speaker) nervous. Thus far I am not blown away by the historical context English readings–they’re okay, but I could name other textbooks whose historical sections I prefer.

But despite these quibbles and questions, I still think I’d do better to scrap my existing vocabulary list and take up with this one. That’ll be a little bit of a project, to organize the AGA vocabulary by chapter and then to start rewriting οἱ λιθικοὶ αἰῶνες. The end result, however, seems likely to be one which is more widely adopted by others, and which and fits more smoothly into the way I actually plan on teaching: in a classroom, face to face with human beings.