🚀 go-pugleaf

On the subject of good beginning Greek texts:

Acquaintances who learned using the JACT Learning Greek report finding it
wonderfully encouraging for getting a beginner reading as quickly as
possible, but complain that they felt deficient in basic grammar.  I
gather that, depending on how you learn, it can either be perfect or
really frustrating.  

My friend Chris (who began Greek at 25 and is doing fantastically) used
Mastronarde for most of his elementary Greek.  He describes it as
basically very good, but with a tendency to blind one with a barrage of
detail.

By contrast, the way Athenaze slowly doles out information may prove
maddening for someone who likes to know the big picture.  I was constantly
looking ahead to fill in the gaps of what they were presenting.  On the
other hand, it's an extremely friendly book, well written and arranged,
and good about introducting reading right from the beginning.  The
readings at the beginning of the chapter form a continous story, which is
fun.  Eventually the pace picks up, and later readings are taken from real
stuff (Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes), so it's pretty easy to take
off from the end of the book into a translation class.  Like Mastronarde,
Athenaze has hypercard-based software that goes with it.

I also spent a little time with Hanson? and Quinn, the book Yale uses.  It
moves very quickly (sometimes dauntingly so), but I think it's good for
giving students a really firm grounding in grammar.

Hope that's helpful,

Kendra