My last post was nearly 12 weeks ago, before the Summer Greek Institute started. The Institute finished a little over a week ago. It was harder, in its way, than anything I’ve ever had to do. I’m not sure whether to feel relieved or bereft. The funny thing is, I expected all this. But I didn’t feel what I was expecting, so I didn’t think twice about taking the course.
The Institute was so trying, specifically in regard to memorization. I seem to recall being able to memorize meaningless tabular material better when I was in my teens and twenties, e.g. in German or math classes. (Principal parts, verb forms, and declensions are meaningful in Greek, of course, but they’re meaningless when you first memorize them.) But since no course I’ve ever taken has been anywhere near as intense as the Institute, it may just be that I’ve always been a mediocre memorizer. My recall did seem to become better-trained over the course of the 10 weeks, but it still fell far short of what several of my younger classmates seemed to achieve with no loss of sleep or dignity.
I sought explanations for this:
- age (I believe I had close to 20 years on the second-oldest student, that is after two students older than I dropped out of the course in its early weeks)
- lack of “extra” motivation (most of the other students were classicists or seminarians taking the course for credit)
- previous exposure to Latin (although I’ve had some German, which is fairly inflected for a modern European language)
- moral turpitude
- lack of oxygen to the brain
In the end, I relied on my old non-explanatory yet strangely comforting standby: It is what it is.
In return for my very real efforts and frustrations, I joined the other survivors at course’s end, picked up my diploma, and took solace in the fact that I had, despite my limitations, come away with a precious nest egg of Greek.
I’ve continued to study. Anything I don’t know, I can get to the bottom of, for the most part. It just takes a while. I intend to do about 15 minutes a day whenever I can. I’ll gird my loins with Liddell & Scott, with the course textbook (“H & Q,” within the Institute), with Marinone’s Tutti I Verbi Greci, and with internet resources like Perseus and Woodhouse’s English-Greek Dictionary. Since I’ll be reading mostly Plato and Aristotle, I’ll sidestep the agonies of sentence structure in Thucydides and of pre-Attic vocabulary in Homer. Any forays into those “toughies” will be backed by as much glossing and commentary as I can lay my hands on.
Aristotle and Plato are plenty hard, by the way.
Ephebe's Journal 