This week from Monday to Friday I did an online intensive course on Ancient Greek! The schedule worked like this: lessons 10am-1pm, lunch break 1pm-2pm, lessons 2pm-4pm, and then an optional lecture 4pm-5pm.
Monday
Today’s lesson was packed full of information that’s essential to learn before you can move on. I’ve done a little Ancient Greek in the past so luckily I already knew a lot of it! We covered the alphabet, diphthongs, breathings and iota subscripts/adscripts; the nominative and accusative cases; definite articles; prepositions; some nouns; and an awful lot of verbs in the first and second declension, singular and plural, and how their definite articles decline with them. 😬 It was a lot to memorise for me, and I already knew half of it – I dread to think how some of the other people are going to keep up!
In the evening, there was a lecture on what you can do with classics career-wise as an A-level which was very interesting and quite helpful as classics is something I’d love to do at A-level!
Tuesday
This morning was packed full of new vocab, the dative case, conjunctions, prepositions, the vocative tense, some English derivations and then a load of exercises translating both from Greek into English and the other way around.
The lecture this evening was on veganism and vegetarianism in the ancient world, which I have to say isn’t really a subject that I’m especially interested in! However, the speaker was really good, and it was actually quite interesting in the end.
Wednesday
Today was really busy! In the morning, we did the imperfect tense, adjectives, a load more nouns and verbs, and adverbs. The lecture tonight was called Hades: from Proto Indo-European to Playstation. The first half hour was about Hades in ancient myth and literature, and the second was about the portrayal of the god in modern video games. I have to say that I found the first half more interesting than the second!
Thursday
Today has to be the most difficult day yet! It was packed full of loads of new vocabulary to memorise as well as a ton of different tenses and things too. In the morning, we did particles, questions, 3rd declension nouns, the future tense, 3rd declension adjectives, the genitive case, expressing time, cardinal and ordinal numbers, and autos (can’t figure out how to get a Greek alphabet keyboard!), which is a very irregular nouny-adjectivey thing that means loads of different things. Its various meanings are changed by simple word order, the accent on the first letter, and the ending of the word in some cases. Very confusing!
Friday
I thought yesterday was difficult, but I should’ve waited until today to make that claim because I am completely overloaded with Greek words and cases and tenses and today was so busy! It is the last day of the course though so I don’t need to worry about tomorrow 😛
This morning, we covered the aorist tense, which can be divided into the strong and weak aorist and is basically (well, not basically, because nothing is basic in Greek), the past tense: I ran, I walked, I wrote, etc. Except it isn’t. I asked my teacher what the difference between the Greek aorist tense and the Latin perfect tense is (Latin perfect means I ran, I walked, etc too), but she wasn’t particularly good at explaining and I still don’t really understand the difference. Anyway; we did the aorist, root aorists, lots of vocab, and then spent the end of the session with the other Greek course group discussing our week.
This week was really fun and I can’t wait to do the Academus Senior Classics course that I’m signed up for next week!!