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Title: Ancient Greek: A New Approach by Carl A. P. Ruck ISBN: 0-262-18047-2 Publisher: Mit Pr Pub. Date: 01 April, 1991 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $31.50

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Average Customer Rating: 3.67 (3 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Good approach, but not for independent study
Comment: I have used two other Greek texts to try to learn the language on my own, Paine's Beginning Greek and Teach Yourself Ancient Greek. Please tolerate my discussion those other books in this review, since my experience with all of them shapes my evaluation of each of them.

TY's book gets is generally good, but has one fatal flaw--sigma is represented with as a roman letter c, "for reasons of convenience, the one increasingly used in modern editions." I've never seen the usage in any other text and, as such, I assume they mean the convenience of the typesetter and publisher, not the student. Also, the noun declensions are in a different order than one would expect--the other texts have nom., gen., etc. while TY goes nom., voc., acc., gen., dat. The layout of TY is extremely dense, with almost no white space, and is thus a very unpleasant read.

The layout of the Paine book is very old style: it looks just like the Latin texts used 30 years ago, with all their infelicities. As for the language and approach of the book, I find it a little stuffy--TY or Ruck is straightforward and helpful, not prickly and standoffish like Paine. The major problem I have with Paine's text can be found on pp. 46-47: a huge , two-page chart conjugating 4 tense systems, 4 voices and 4 moods of the verb to loose, luw. If you multiply that by 6 forms (I, you, s/he, we, you, and they), the number of elements grows to over 300. I found it impossible to digest such a huge gulp of grammar despite rehearsing it repeatedly and doing the exercises. Greek is a very complex language, more so than Latin. However, I see no reason for such an explosion of grammatical complexity.

Ruck, though generally excellent, has a fatal flaw for the independent learner--no answers are provided for any exercises. While the layout is the best of the three, with lots of white space making reading it a pleasure, this comes at the sacrafice of row labels for the model declensions and conjugations. A minor annoyance that makes it difficult to tell at first glance what you're looking at. Also, a minor annoyance--the text uses an alternate, cursive form or theta. While this book has an excellent approach, I cannot recommend it for the independent learner because of the lack of answers to the excercises. As far as I know, there is no teacher's guide for this book.

I haven't yet found any text that's right for me. Perhaps the Athenaze books, much maligned for being too basic, would be more fitting, although I don't see a teacher's guide for Volume I.

Rating: 5
Summary: Good Book (Kalov Bibliov)
Comment: I think that this is one of the better Greek language books out there. It presents the information in a very unique (and, I believe, more structurally sound) way. The "horizontal" approach to grammar is much more practical than the traditional paradigm, or vertical, approach. This book allows you to learn grammar as a means towards communication, rather than as a list of rules to be memorized and, if possible, applied later.
I would recommend using this book, and perhaps supplementing it with another, more traditional, Greek textbook. After all, it certainly doesn't hurt to approach the material from multiple angles.

Rating: 3
Summary: kakon biblion
Comment: Not bad considering the shortage of Ancient Greek textbooks, but Ruck's technique of inductive teaching fails to present information in a straight-forward format. Adequate for use as an accompaniment to live instruction, as it does not provide the answers to the many exercises. Lacks an English-Greek glossary, and the Greek-English glossary is missing vocabulary contained in the chapter. On the other hand, the text is more comprehensive than a basic text such as "Athenaze," but less in-depth than one such as "Greek:An Intensive Course." These are the only textbooks with which I am familiar, so I am using them as points of reference.