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I am a Sixth Form student in the UK. I have just completed my Latin AS and am teaching myself ancient Greek.

After using the first few CLC books as a start to Latin GCSE, we used John Taylor's Essential GCSE Latin. The CLC books are, in my opinion, probably a better starting point for self-teaching Latin than that John Taylor book, but after a few of the CLC books, you should be in a great position to start learning from the John Taylor book, which provides lots of information with clear examples and detailed explanations, but which relies upon a reasonable amount of base knowledge. There's then his Latin Beyond GCSE after that. I would certainly recommend them and have found them to be good and useful.

For Greek, however, John Taylor has a series of books designed for students to teach themselves Greek from no knowledge of it, and your knowledge of Latin means that you'll be comfortable with most or all of the linguistic concepts in the early stages, so you shouldn't be delayed by that. I am currently working through these, and have found them excellent. They will build up your knowledge of Greek on a step-by-step basis, from understanding the alphabet to genitive absolutes and the subjunctive mood and whatnot, with longer and more complex passages to translate as the books develop, and plenty of vocabulary introduced across the books. I have completed Greek to GCSE Part 1, am working through Greek to GCSE Part 2, and have Greek Beyond GCSE lined up.

In terms of what works best... Well, it seems as though it used to be that Latin and Greek were taught with a strong grammatical focus. This is certainly important, but I would personally suggest doing that as a supplement to the induction approach which the CLC and John Taylor's Greek books take. I personally have found that approach more interesting and more enjoyable, and all of the grammar and endings will probably sink in quickly enough and probably more quickly when you're seeing them in the context of proper passages, rather than just tables of stuff.

I realise that this is rather generic. Please feel free to ask more about any of these things if they're unclear or you want to find out more! Best of luck with your studies!

Edit: links

For learning Ancient Greek (as an autodidact), start by signing up for The Great Courses Plus and take the Ancient Greek course, taught by Hans-Friedrich Meuller:

Greek 101: Learning an Ancient Language | The Great Courses Plus

You can sign up for a free trial on The Great Courses, for just long enough to complete the Greek course. But I think it’s totally worth paying for ALL of the content.

I recommend downloading the guidebook and doing ALL of the homework. Copy and paste the exercises into a Word doc and type out the answers/translations. Take the course as many times as you can for mastery.

I’ve created a couple of free courses on Memrise for Ancient Greek verbs that (I hope) people may find helpful. I use (my best attempt at) Modern Greek pronunciation. Audio can be disabled by anyone who has a problem with that. My Memrise account (Diachronix) has some other Modern Greek courses.

Paradigms of Ancient Greek Verbs

Principal Parts of Ancient Greek verbs

Professor Al Duncan produced an excellent series of Ancient Greek videos (on Youtube: Learn Attic Greek with Al Duncan - YouTube), which follows along the exercises in chapters 1–10 and 30–34 of Cynthia Shelmerdine’s Introduction to Greek.

That textbook is a bit error-prone, but it’s still pretty good for beginners. I recommend using it to follow along in Professor Duncan’s videos, at least until they cut off at chapter 10. But you’re on your own between chapters 11 and 29. Again, I recommend typing out ALL of the exercises.

The Athenaze Book 1 and Athenaze Book 2 are good self-study resources for intermediate learners, with a lot of excellent reading material. I also have a Memrise course for the vocabulary in these texbooks.

Athenaze: Book 1

Athenaze: Book 2

Leonard Muellner (Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Brandeis University) has a Youtube series on Ancient Greek: Learn Ancient Greek, with Prof. Leonard Muellner - YouTube

Unfortunately the audio throughout most of this series is terrible. But if you manage to listen closely (and not fall asleep), it’s quite edifying. Meullner is a genius. The course follows along the Greek: An Intensive Course textbook by Hansen & Quinn. You could try getting that textbook and following along, but I would recommend this last. I just can’t imagine most people having the patience for it. And I’ve heard mixed reviews on Hansen & Quinn, which professor Meullner criticizes ad nauseam throughout his videos.

Another resource I really like is the online version of ΓΡΑΜΜΑΤΙΚΗ ΤΗΣ ΑΡΧΑΙΑΣ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗΣ by ΟΙΚΟΝΟΜΟΥ. You can turn the audio in the bottom right and a robot reads it out-loud. It’s helpful to learn the grammatical terminology in Greek and, if you can manage reading demotic Greek, you can experience the way the Greeks approach Ancient Greek (and observe the notable differences). They have interesting grammatical category distinctions that we don’t have in the West, many of which are quite handy. But this textbook doesn’t have any engaging reading material, aside from bland descriptions of the language. So it’s not for everyone.

Most other learning material I could recommend is mentioned in the various links above. But here are some key items for building a collection of self-study material:

*Geoffrey Horrocks’ “Greek - A History of the Language and Its Speakers” (MUST READ)

Plato: A Transitional Reader

Kaegi’s Greek Grammar

Smyth’s Greek Grammar

Plato Apology

Homeric Greek - A Book for Beginners

Rouse’s Greek Boy - A Reader

Basics of Biblical Greek

A Graded Reader of Biblical Greek

Geoffrey Steadman’s Ancient Greek reader SERIES

Not sure what facility you’re referring to, but 34 is NOT too old! Consistency is your best friend; you don’t need to practice a lot everyday, but you DO need to practice everyday. I’ve been using Learn to Read Greek, but I’ve also heard good things about Athenaze. Good luck to you!

Ok, your biggest upcoming danger is the summer, unless you plan to take Greek classes then. Assuming two semesters at your school are sufficient to get you at least exposed to all the morphology and much of the syntax, I would strongly recommend you pick something to read over the summer, to keep your Greek in shape and to solidify what you've learned so far.

This blog post has a list of readers: Greek Readers, but you could also probably start with a good school edition of one of the simpler authors (Xenophon, a bit dull but a standard; some of Plato's dialogs aren't too bad). I would avoid the historians for now. Thucydides is tough, and though Herodotus is fairly easy he uses a different dialect, and for now it may be best to focus on the Attic you've been learning in class. This edition of Lucian's True History is pretty good, though I will warn you the first few paragraphs of the text are excruciating. Once you get past that, it's much easier going. Geoffrey Steadman's annotated texts can be had as both books and PDFs. The old Parsons' Tablet of Cebes is also very easy (beware of reprints - some are barely legible). Steadman also has a version of this, though not yet in print.

Keller and Russel have textbooks that can give you a good foundation. I think they are usually used in a classroom context but the texts give enough information to understand the material thoroughly and the workbook that comes with it is nearly exhaustive in terms of ensuring you know the material that is covered in the texts.

The vocabulary they teach is pretty limited. but you can find good decks of flash cards or vocab lists to compliment the books quite easily.

Learn to Read Greek: Part 1, Textbook and Workbook Set https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300167717/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_.mUDDb4D4BZR2

Here's a quick refresher for you!

>ποϊετε


Even if the diaeresis were a circumflex, it would still fall in the wrong place. Remember that:

1. a circumflex can never fall on the antepenult
   
   
   
2. in the present system, a contract verb like ποιέω must add the thematic ending -ετε onto a stem ending with a vowel, which then contracts (in attic Greek anyway), so our 'formula' for the conjugation must take the accent of that uncontracted vowel into account, and ποιέ+ετε becomes ποιεῖτε ( έὲ ➡️ εῖ , where the circumflex retains the natural rise and fall of the two uncontracted vowels)
   
   
   If you'd like to brush up on accents, Philomen Probert has an awesome book with all the rules of accents, and exercises to reinforce them: https://www.amazon.com/Short-Accentuation-Ancient-Advanced-Language/dp/1853995991
   
   (This can easily be found on certain Russian pirate book websites too, though I don't think I can link one here)
   
   
   Another book that may help is Hansen and Quinn's Greek: An Intensive Course, which, as the name suggests, is designed to be used for intense language acquisition. (This can also be found by dedicated pirates)

Most editions of the NT don't include Loeb-style facing Greek and English texts. The most popular editions include Greek-only with an apparatus, footnotes, and dictionary. A Reader's Greek NT (amazon link below) has the best footnotes for the best price (mostly just uncommon words). There's also an interlinear lexicon available, if you want the extra help. It speeds up ease of reading, with common words listed by book and chapter, but you may not need it (link below).

As far as dialect goes, most people find Attic easier than Koine. The exception is that some vocabulary is context-driven, with meanings which are specific to the NT, Septuagint, or both (which is where Kubo is useful). Sometimes, authors use Hebrew expressions translated literally into Greek. I would start with John, and I John (and Mark is probably too easy), if you want to get a grasp of the style. Move into Luke/Acts if you want something that more resembles Attic style narrative (i.e. harder). Hebrews also resembles Attic grammar in some ways, but contains more Hebraisms.

If you are stuck on Greek/English interlinears in the Loeb style, you might want to consider reading Flavius Josephus (available in Loeb). His works on the History of the Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities use an Attic/Koine mix that might be more useful than trying to slog through new NT vocabulary. The Apostolic Fathers, which are post-NT Christian authors, are also available in Loeb, and they have similar themes and vocabulary to NT.

Ultimately, I would not recommend reading the NT unless your goal is to read the NT. If you want to get better at reading Attic, go read something written by native Athenians (Xenophon, Plato, etc.).

Links:

Reader's NT: https://www.amazon.com/Readers-Greek-New-Testament-Third/dp/0310516803/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1542997817&sr=8-5&keywords=greek+new+testament

Sakae Kubo: https://www.amazon.com/Readers-Greek-English-Testament-Zondervan-Reference/dp/0310269202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542998398&sr=8-1&keywords=sake+kubo

Josephus (War I-III): https://www.amazon.com/Josephus-Classical-Library-English-Ancient/dp/0674992237/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1542999070&sr=1-3&keywords=loeb+flavius+josephus

Apostolic Fathers I: https://www.amazon.com/Apostolic-Fathers-Vol-Ignatius-Classical/dp/0674996070

This is a nicely annotated compendium that teaches the history of Ancient Greek through reading. You will find a huge assortment of dialects and genres represented:

https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Greek-Reader-Mycenaean-Koine/dp/0199226601

Combine with an historical grammar and you should be good to go. This is a recent introduction by a great scholar:

https://www.amazon.de/Historische-Grammatik-Griechischen-Laut-Formenlehre/dp/3534206819

Anything by Pierre Chantraine is highly recommended if you can read french. Both his treatment of Homeric, his historical grammar and his dictionary.

Another good dictionary to consult for individual glosses is the one by the late Robert Beekes. It's not perfect but very accessible:

https://brill.com/view/title/17726?lang=en

I would recommend you to consult Fortson and Ringe if you have little previous experience with diachronic linguistics. Ringe for methodological questions and Fortson for Proto-Indoeuropean. Proto-Greek contains many morphological archaisms inherited from Proto-Indoeuropean. You can focus on inner greek developments, but not everything you encounter can be analyzed in a meaningful way within Greek, so it's good to know where to look if the greek data is insufficient:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/historical-linguistics/6722029555C7DB845251785673A48B4C

https://www.amazon.com/Indo-European-Language-Culture-Benjamin-Fortson/dp/1405188960

If you want an in depth introduction to Ancient Greek dialects for students at graduate level and above this tome by Gary Miller should come in handy along with Buck's classic work on the subject, but it's not necessary if you only want to brush up on the fundamentals:

https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Greek-Dialects-Early-Authors/dp/1614514933

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-greek-dialects-9781853995569/

I'm an autodidact. I bought three volumes of the JACT Cambridge Reading Greek:

Grammary, Vocabulary and Exercises

Text

An indipendent guide

You can buy them on Amazon.

If you don't mind older texts, you could get free ebooks from here https://www.textkit.com/greek_grammar.php

E.g, https://www.textkit.com/learn/ID/159/author_id/75/

or https://www.textkit.com/learn/ID/136/author_id/39/

Make sure you get the key to the exercises. Work methodically through the books without cutting corners. Feel free to ask for help here.

​

EDIT

Added Amazon links.

This is an excellent beginning commentary for the Apology. It has a detailed running grammatical commentary on every page and vocab in the back. It is perfect as a first introduction to Greek prose for third semester students who have just worked through grammar for a full year.

Here's the edition of the Crito I've also used for beginning prose.

The Republic tends to be a bit more involved. I've not seen it used, but here is the Bryn Mawr for book I. I'd recommend the Apology first, though.

If you're looking for basic scholarship on Plato, I'm not really the person to ask, so I'll leave that to others. I'd recommend asking in /r/classics and /r/askphilosophy as well.

This on Homeric vocabulary is good: https://archive.org/details/homericvocabula00goodgoog

Here's the 500 most common words in Ancient Greek prose: do you know them all? http://dcc.dickinson.edu/greek-core-list

I found the book Classical Greek Prose: A Basic Vocabulary to be very helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Greek-Prose-Basic-Vocabulary/dp/1853995592. It's the 1500 most common words in Attic prose.

​

Finally, another thing you can do that helps expand your vocabulary is make sure you understand what all the prefixes tend to do. If you know what τίθημι means and you know what κατα tends to mean as a prefix, you can figure out what κατατίθημι means even if you haven't memorized that one specifically.

Most people have responded to your desire to know more about how Greek evolved. However, if you want to learn Classical Ancient Greek, I strongly recommend Luschnig, Attic Greek. It's a great book. I learned Greek from it, and have taught Greek from it. https://smile.amazon.com/Introduction-Ancient-Greek-Literary-Approach/dp/0872208893/

Chase and Phillips is pretty decent (though definitely reflects the period when it was written):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0674616006/ref=mw_dp_olp?ie=UTF8&condition=all

Hansen and Quinn is also good:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0823216632/ref=mw_dp_olp?ie=UTF8&condition=all

I’ve taught with H&Q and used C&P as a supplement when I started to learn Greek.

My Greek professor strongly recommends against using Athenaze, and I'm not a fan of the "Reading ____" series myself. (I'm currently using the "Reading Latin" books.) I would recommend Introduction to Greek by Cynthia Shelmerdine.

Edit: Here it is if you're interested: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Greek-Cynthia-W-Shelmerdine/dp/1585101842

There is also this book: http://www.amazon.com/Greek-Intensive-Course-Hardy-Hansen/dp/0823216632. I haven't personally used this one, but a couple professors have recommended it.

This series is awesome.

These 118 lectures are free, and if you want to also have a book, the lectures follow the structure of this one.

Philomen Probert's book A New Short Guide to the Accentuation of Ancient Greek might help you here - she explains matters fairly simply and has a ton of exercises for practice.

[This PDF from UT Dallas should also help.] (http://udallasclassics.org/maurer_files/GGH-2009-web.pdf) It's a bit of an infodump, but if you reference it continually for a month or two you should fall into the right habits regarding accentuation.

For what it's worth, I once heard that using the recessive rule for both nouns and verbs, while inaccurate, would grant about an 80% result. Not that I'm recommending this, but if you get desperate (or you're in an exam and can't remember how the nominative of something is accented) you could try that.

Thank you so much for the response and encouragement!

I have this: https://www.amazon.com/Lucians-True-Story-Intermediate-Vocabulary/dp/0983222800/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1468784832&sr=8-1&keywords=true+story+lucian

and this:

https://www.amazon.com/Plato-Apology-Greek/dp/0865163480/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1468784855&sr=8-4&keywords=apology+greek

but find them both a little bit too difficult for me right now. Do you think Crito and Lysias are easier than the Apology, or that Steadman is more user-friendly than Helm?

> And just reading that with no dictionary or pen is something to be damn proud of:) Ancient Greek is wonderful.

) I know, and I am. It's just killing me that I'm practically fluent with parts of the NT (and I'm not religious, so it's not like I've just memorized this stuff) but taking 3.5 minutes for a sentence or two of Attic. I know it's more difficult, but it is a little confidence-shocking. I'll keep working at it, though!

Yes:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Independent-Study-Guide-Reading-Greek/dp/0521698502/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518644086&sr=1-1-fkmr1&keywords=jact+reading+greek+independent+study+guide

There’s also Keller and Russell’s Learn to Read Greek, which in my view is slightly better paced for self-study than Hansen and Quinn.