For all that the Greek readings in Saffire & Freis’s textbook possess real charm, spending more time with those texts has made me realize how tricky it would be to re-draft my little historical reader to align with its vocabulary progression. The trouble is that the stories are just so very short, often on the order of about 100-200 words long. And for all that I like very much the idea of the Thesaurus at the back, the amount of unfamiliar vocabulary in them is probably just too overwhelming for a beginner student. The NT selections are not so bad on this front as the ones from Heraclitus; at least, the NT verses selected tend to feature much more internal repetition of words. I acknowledge that the Thesaurus sections were chosen mainly for their foregrounding of certain grammatical structures, and that the authors of Ancient Greek Alive don’t (presumably) see vocabulary acquisition as a goal for that section. But that makes no sense. When you read, it matters whether or not you know what most of the words mean. When most of the words in a sentence have to be glossed for you–and the same is true of the next sentence, and the one after that–it is hard to see how a student will be able to internalize the grammatical structure with which they are being presented. This is just silly. The same, by the way, is true of the lines from Sappho which constitute the student’s second poem to be memorized–and this for a poem that’s already in Aeolic.

I still think this book would work okay for a student who loved to memorize and found it quite easy to do: you would simply have the student more-or-less memorize the folk tales as well as the Thesaurus selections. If a student was willing to memorize everything, then they’d eventually end up able to read Greek. However, this textbook offers nowhere near enough material–and too much of it, much too difficult–for a student to learn by reading. Even then, I still think that a student would learn better from reading exponentially more Greek.

The lists of “vocabulary to be learnt” are a little misleading in this regard: they don’t at all prepare you for the Thesaurus readings. They teach you most of the words that show up in the folk tales. I think that’s a shame, to decide that students have to struggle through texts they’re wildly under-prepared for, and then fail to even incorporate the rewards of those struggles into the rest of the text.

I think, if I were really committed to writing a reader to go with this textbook, what I’d need to do is to give up altogether on the idea of history per se and go back to the epistolary idea. You would want to write pretty much one letter for every single chapter of this book. I don’t know whether the fictional baby Greek letters I’ve written are sufficiently charming for students to enjoy reading one every day or not. It would require a lot of creativity, to figure out a new letter to write that fits well with every single day’s vocabulary. Also, the vocabulary is distributed with great unevenness across the days, but it’s not uncommon to encounter a day with twenty or even thirty new words, counting the vocabulary in the Thesaurus. And should one include the vocabulary in the Thesaurus, to begin with? If you don’t, what’s the point of the section to begin with?

Maybe it would be a good creative writing exercise for me to try and make the epistolary reader happen as a companion volume to AGA. But that removes the prime advantage of the historical reader, i.e., it was supposed to make it easy for teachers to find things to talk about in Greek, in the classroom, every day. If I go back to epistolary reader, it’s no longer the case that one could count on having the option of a safe, easy, informative discussion topic for every single class. And I liked the idea of learning Ancient Greek through History, darn it. It meets a real need, I think: students do tend to be woefully ignorant of the ancient world in which Greek speakers lived and wrote and traveled.

So I don’t know that I really will throw out the idea of an LGPSI historical companion reader after all. For all that I think Saffire’s little stories are so charming and re-readable, I think the vocabulary in the early chapters of this book is simply too difficult to adapt that way.