I’m striving slowly to pick up a little classical Greek, as a tool to aid study in other disciplines (philosophy, history, at al). It’s obviously a fascinating language with a fascinating history, but despite many corollaries to English (vice versa, technically), there are a number of hindrances, curiosities that make Greek peculiar, and difficult to pick up quickly, at least in my case.

One interesting meta-note that springs to the forefront in part from its ubiquity is the apparent failure of many otherwise capable authors in explaining the Greek system.

The learner of classical Greek will find countless resources available to study, and some older tomes still stand well beside the modern in composing an erudite library for study. But old and new alike contain this same deficiency. Why? For the fairly straightforward reason that the majority of those familiar with classical Greek, certainly those familiar enough to write a book on the subject, are academics — typically academics with decades of experience neck-deep in the study and use of this particular discipline.

Many students encounter this same struggle in any college-level course, especially within technical disciplines — really any course of study where the knowledge is highly specialized. The more specialized, the more the knowledge requires long, careful ingestion, and the more it represents the niche of the educator.

Much like a C-level businessman slinging buzzwords, this entrenchment renders it nearly impossible for a learned academic to remove his or herself from the depth of knowledge and understanding they have accumulated. The knower no longer knows what they know — they simply know. Deeply ingested concepts become ingrained, passive — obvious. Obvious, of course, to any with a decade or two or three of study.

As an example in my own recent experience, I have struggled to follow and memorize the rules of accent marks that apply to Greek words (glyphs around a letter, as in “née” or the older style of “rôle”). From what I know so far, this is a relatively important concept in distinguishing one Greek word from another and most any author on the subject spends several pages at the least iterating the rules, the names, and how to distinguish them.

Because of my difficulties picking up these rules, and as a general aid to study, I use additional resources as references when I fail to follow a concept in the first. Even with this I found some struggle in systematizing these rules mentally well enough to memorize, and it was only when I started paralleling my study in a second book that I discovered the following line:

There are three accents— acute (´), grave (`), and
circumflex (ˆ). They do not affect the pronunciation,
but…are at times the sole means of distinguishing between words

Accent marks do not impact how you speak a word. They may impact how you interpret a word, if context is insufficient. Surely this is critical in achieving fluency, and in readings where context is limited, like an archival fragment. For the amateur reader, it is not critical to know the accent rules until reading well enough that there is need to distinguish otherwise comparable words or identify with certainty a word in isolation.

From a properly academic perspective — and to be fair, from a correctly didactic perspective — it is a core concept. It ought to be taught and learned early on so that the reader picks up on these marks from the start.

Yet for the casual learner — in this case, me — this huge stumbling block has turned out to be a concept that I can note, record, and reference, and learn over time, without such worry over grinding to a complete halt until I make myself memorize these seemingly arbitrary rules that will seem intuitive only when I have gained some experience in reading Greek! In other words, I can get there a bit backwards, as long as I don’t totally ignore it.

You might think I could have found this solution online pretty easily, but I wasn’t aware to ask the question! Maybe it’s an elementary concept to some, but I would never — until now — think to question whether the concept so clearly important that’s being introduced and called out by every author is not actually that important just yet, but rather a concept to note and keep track of for later. What a difference!

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Greek is primarily an oratory language, like Latin, and the historicity of accent marks stands them sensible. However, the distinction between  a concept that must be absorbed during the journey of learning and a concept that must be memorized immediately in order to proceed with any level of comprehension does not occur to most authors to elucidate. Why would it? It’s a core concept. Students: memorize this table, the first of many.

I can’t protest against this traditional method of language learning. The ingestion of key concepts from the onset of learning via some degree of associative memorization is simply necessary in learning just about any language. But understanding what you are learning while you’re learning it is also necessary, in my opinion. It’s the same problem we encounter as a society in teaching math — when you’re young, you are taught only rules, rules, rules. They seem arbitrary, complex, and unnecessary. It’s only for those relatively few who are naturally mathematically inclined and stick it out long enough who find out that these rules are, in fact, sensible, fairly intuitive, and arise naturally from the fundaments of examining the world in a logical fashion.

Of course middle schoolers can’t be taught mathematical reasoning from the ground up — usually. But a good educator can (and some do) incorporate explanations, elaborations, and associations to related concepts and to the logical underpinnings of modern mathematics. This broader approach appeals to many students who are intelligent, interested, and often highly talented in other studies, but feel dwarfed by the intimidating complexity represented by algebra, geometry, trigonometry, etc, when first encountered. Teaching math from the point of view of one who already knows how to do it is distinctly counterproductive (with rare exceptions).