Five weeks left of classes, and we are just a few pages from the end of Crito. Spending the whole school year walking with the 10th–12th graders through Crito has provided me the first chance I’ve ever had to work slowly through an entire Classical Greek text. Each week I worked through a paragraph or two at least twice before class, I read it with the students in class, and then before moving to the next passage the following week, I would read back through it again. I learned so much this year.

The biggest gain was growing comfortable with the sentence structure and syntax. I think Crito would be considered a “1 John” for Classical Greek, but it is far more challenging for someone born and bred on Koine than anything in the NT. 2 Maccabees or Diognetus might be comparable, but dialogue is a completely different animal. Anyway, here are the resources I used:

• Lysias I and Plato’s Crito, Geoffrey Steadman (PDF / Amazon)
• Plato: Euthryphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Loeb 36, Chris Emlyn-Jones & William Preddy (Amazon)
• Plato: Crito, Introduction, and Commentary, Bristol Commentary, Chris Emlyn-Jones (Amazon)

The new Emlyn-Jones Loeb made getting the ball rolling much easier. Using this diglot as a teacher helped me get comfortable with the style much more quickly. Just to mention a few of the issues: all the little emphatic particles, lots of impersonal verbs, extensive use of verbal adjectives, the “οἷος τε + εἰμί” constructions, and the long, rambling questions.

One other note on getting used to the higher register of Classical Greek: For about a year and a half now I’ve been helping a student work through Keller and Russell’s Learn to Read Greek. We are a couple chapters into book 2. I’ve found the workbook exercises to be helpful because they are (1) copious in number and (2) realistically challenging. This is the grammar I recommend for people who are looking to make the transition from Koine to Classical, but only for those interested in a more thorough, longterm solution. The grammar is massive and really something closer to an elementary combined with intermediate grammar. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. LTRG, however, is the topic of another post.

Steadman’s reader is the only classroom resource we use. It is great because it doesn’t just provide vocabulary; it includes a ton of syntax help, as well. For the 10th graders this is the very first text they have read outside the New Testament, and Steadman’s thorough notes are a must. I can give them help in class, but they need something written down as they re-read. He provides free PDFs online, and he self-publishes his books so they are affordable. You definitely want to explore his website if you never have.

Finally, the Emlyn-Jones commentary was helpful from time-to-time, but the combination of the Loeb and Steadman would have been enough. The commentary is super concise and strikes a nice balance between linguistic and literary concerns.

I hope these resource notes are helpful and you are motivated to pick up a Crito text soon and see how much progress you can make this summer.

This is my fifth year teaching Greek to middle and high schoolers. Each year I figure out how to do this a little better. We are five months into the school year, and this year’s big take away is clear. Daily recitation is essential in the grammar stage.

Worth the time

For us, the grammar stage takes two years. Seventh grade is the first seventeen lessons of Croy’s grammar; eighth grade is the last fifteen. That means we have around thirty-five weeks each year to cover about sixteen lessons. If you start reciting everything you know on day one and keep doing this every day you meet, the forms soak in deep. Even at this point in the year, where in Greek 1 we are reciting all the forms for lessons 2–12, reciting all the forms takes less than ten minutes. Giving ten minutes out of our seventy minute class periods to form review is totally doable and worth it.

Modeling Memorization

But what is this like for the students? When I first started teaching, I thought it would be miserable and monotonous. I didn’t learn the forms via in-class recitation. I don’t think hardly any one teaches Greek this way in seminary. Maybe daily classroom recitation is thought to be beneath adults. This is odd because even though I didn’t learn the forms through classroom recitation, I did learn my paradigms by reciting them to myself. I remember my teacher encouraging us to do this.

If you do not know your third declension forms, it is because you are not chanting them enough. Even in the shower you need to be saying, “Mmm, os, ee, ah, es, ōn, sin, ahs!”

I remember reciting those forms in class, and at the end of that semester the third declension paradigms stuck better than any other. I suppose the reason we do not give more time to recitation in seminary is because of the pace at which Greek is taught. The exact grammar through which I take middle schoolers over the course of two years is the same grammar we went through in seminary in fifteen weeks. Whatever the reason we do not do recitation in seminary, I think we should consider it. Daily recitation models how most of us learned our paradigms. Learning to read Greek and Latin is not about being smart. It’s about perseverance.

Student Experience

Now that I have I have given daily recitation a try, I see that it is any thing but boring for the students. They love it. You can make recitation boring if you do it in a monotone, sluggish way, but you can also make it fun. I say the label, they repeat the label, and then we say the forms together. I don’t make songs for the paradigms, but we always recite rhythmically. Every declension has it’s own unique rhythm. Even if the difference is subtle between the way we recite first declension endings and the way we recite second declension, having that rhythmic difference in place breaks the noun paradigms into chunks.

For pronouns, we recite down the columns, instead of across. Each demonstrative starts with a long hold on the nominative, and then like a rollercoaster coming down the big hill we zip to the bottom of each column. We always emphasize the genitive plural, τούτων, because it is the same across all three genders. For the definite article, we start slow with the masculine singular, speed up with the feminine singular, and then by the time we get to the neuters we are saying them as fast as we can. For infinitives we say each letter of the ending. In Greek 2 classes, we alternate one day of doing all the Greek 1 forms, the next day all the forms we have learned in Greek 2 up to that point.

After typing that paragraph, I realize that this is something better heard than explained. Please pardon our Erasmian pronunciation and my absurdly southern accent (de-CLIN-sion). Here is my seventh grade Greek 1 class from today:

Greek Recitation Lessons 2-12

Conclusion

This is my one of favorite parts of the day, and the students enjoy it, as well. If you haven’t given daily recitation a try, go for it. I think it would be worth a shot in graduate programs, too.

A parent, who wants to purchase a GNT as a Christmas gift for his son, emailed me and asked what I would recommend. I recommend one of two options.

Reader’s Greek New Testament

There are several of these on the market, but in my opinion this one is the best. It is absolutely beautiful and provides both vocabulary and some parsing helps. There is no English translation, however.

The UBS Greek New Testament: Reader’s Edition with Textual notes, Flexisoft Leather Black

Greek-English New Testament

Again lots of these on the market, but this is the best. On one side of the page you have the Greek New Testament beautifully typeset to line up well with the NIV on the facing page. No parsing or vocab helps, but it’s a great Greek-English edition. I would not recommend an interlinear. If you want something Greek-English, this is the ticket.

The Greek-English New Testament: UBS 5th Revised Edition and NIV

I own both of these and love them. The first time I read through the GNT it was with a reader’s Bible, the first edition of the one listed above. When asked for a recommendation, this is always the first thing out of my mouth. If, however, the plan is not necessarily to chip away at reading through the whole GNT and mastering the most frequent vocab but to simply have the Greek and English accessible in church, option 2 would be the way to go.