A retrospective on my Clyde Pharr Cram
Last Edited: Sun Jan 19 05:27:15 UTC 2025
If you're looking for how to learn Greek (whatever that means to you), you'll probably be best suited by the excellent resources and advice given in places like the textkit forums. If you, like me, are someone who derives enjoyment from going about things with your own personal trial and error, I hope you'll be willing to take my experience as a data point to make your learning as efficient and enjoyable as possible.
As a college student with nothing but free time over winter break, I decided to go through Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek. I took care to memorize all of the forms, terms, and vocabulary. For context I'm a college senior with 6 semesters of Ancient Greek under my belt, so I'm not exactly a beginner, but I've noticed that since leaving intro Greek I've forgotten lots of the "basics" either because they haven't come up in the texts I've read, or because I've been using commentaries and parsing tools as a crutch when they have come across. I also haven't taken a rigorous approach to vocabulary, so I wanted to take this opportunity to systematize my knowledge.
I spent the last semester studying Homer (Books 1, 6, and 24) and I really enjoyed it so I decided on Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek: A book for beginners.
Methodology & Schedule
My studying began on December 21st where I started with chapters 11 & 12. I did 2 chapters/day until January 8th where I bumped it up to 3 chapters/day until chapter 77 on January 17th. In going through these chapters I took care to memorize every form of every verb, tables of endings, pronouns, accentuation rules, scansion, the inflection of certain model verbs, and certain grammar terminology that I wanted to commit to memory.
I made sure to read every word on the page and to actually flip to and read the portions from the Grammar in the back.
I have used Anki as spaced repetition software where I used 5 main types of cards:
1 - Basic & Reversed for nouns and adjectives
On the front of the card I would have a noun paradigm on the front and on the back I had a definition "peak, summit, crest". I required myself to memorize these cards forwards and backwards.
2 - Cloze of verb principal parts
The cards would look something like this:
{{c1::1st}}, {{c2::2nd}}, {{c3::3rd}}, {{c4::4th}}, {{c5::5th}}, {{c6::6th}} {{c7::go across, pass through, traverse, accomplish, pass over}}
For those unfamiliar with the software, each of the {{c#::word}} groups creates a fill-in-the blank style card. When necessary I would include other pieces of information like if the verb means something different in a certain tense or voice.
3 - Cloze cards of compound verbs
Cards would look like:
{{c1::prep}} + {{c2::verb}} is used to mean {{c3::begin, perform the initiatory rites}}
I found this to be an efficient way to go about things because if I already know what the principal parts of a verb are, there's no reason for me to waste my time with 7 cards (6 pps + 1 definition) if 3 will do.
4 - Iliad memorization
I've also decided to memorize the first 100 lines of the Iliad where I used the LPCG anki addon which makes cards that look like this:
1st line
2nd line
[...]
Where I have to supply the next line.
5 - Cloze Tables
For certain forms I would create an HTML table in the card and make a cloze deletion (fill in the blank) to memorize the information.
Useful stats/information
Over this period of time I was doing an average of 734 reviews/day which ended up looking like 146 minutes/day (however by the end it was closer to 4 hours/day on average). I ended up with 3520 total cards, 56% of which are considered "mature" by the software.
For those who use Anki, I had my FSRS desired retention set to 95%, but have since bumped it down to 88% and am doing a much more reasonable (and continually dwindling) number of cards/day.
What went well
- I finally know how accents work
- I finally know how scansion works (I didn't focus much on it over my semester, but as next semester is Lyric Poetry I figured it would be good if I internalized the Homeric rules)
- I feel very confident with my mastery of nouns & adjectives
- I feel much better about my mastery of verbs
- I effectively have a database of all of my Ancient Greek knowledge
- I feel much better equipped to interface with commentaries in the wild. In the past I haven't been able to get much out of these because, even if it gave me the dictionary form of a potentially tricky word, I wouldn't know it and would need to look up in a dictionary anyways. Furthermore, I have committed to memory what certain grammatical terminology means and I no longer need a reference for it.
- My vocabulary is much more expansive. This one's self explanatory but I cracked open my Lyric Poetry book for next semester and was immediately able to read one of the Archilochus poems thanks to the vocab I had memorized.
- I get hard stuck less often. My goal is to be able to read Greek without needing to constantly refer to online tools like Perseus, dictionaries, and translations (and this means reading in Greek, not translating in my head). However, when I do come across a sentence that doesn't make immediate sense, my more rigorous understanding of grammar means that I'm much better equipped to puzzle out the sentence (why is a word in a particular case, what does this mood typically mean with ἄν).
What went poorly
- There are a great number of synonyms in this book which made going from English -> Greek very difficult. My solution was including the first letter or first few letters of the word as a note to appear with the card, but this is less than ideal.
- Verbs can still be tricky for me.
- It took an insane amount of time each day. (4-5hrs/day is just not sustainable long term and I'm already a little burnt out)
- There are some concepts I still don't really get. My conditionals are still kinda hazy and I don't quite understand. This might be seen as something that went poorly, but as part of my journey I don't feel too bad about this one.
- Many words just did not stick in my head.
- I stopped doing the exercises. I was spending so much time doing vocabulary that I wasn't able to do my English->Greek exercises. I also stopped writing translations for the Greek->English stuff, but I don't think this is an issue because the vast majority are just prose re-statements of the selected reading portion. Pro tip: if you're stuck when reading the authentic text of the Iliad, reading the Greek->English exercises is really useful as a way to comprehend the text while staying "In language"
- Time spent doing flashcards instead of reading. Did I mention how much time this took? This took SO much time out of my day. Furthermore, I spent more time doing flashcards than I spent reading Greek.
What I will change moving forward
- Time: I have since bumped down my desired retention which will lead to FAR fewer cards I have to do each day. Also, now that I have this base AND I have them in my Spaced Repetition Software, I don't plan on doing anything like it again. I'll just be reading Ancient Greek from here on out.
- Flashcards: I don't plan on using the above card types for verbs moving forward. If it's a common verb I don't know, I'll probably do a principal parts card, but for less common verbs I won't. Instead I plan on making cards that ask things like "What's the first principal of [highlighted verb in a sentence]?" or "What does [highlighted verb in a sentence] mean in this context?" and "Why does [highlighted verb in a sentence] mean [X] in this context?" The important thing here is that I'll be learning in context now that I have a meaningful base vocabulary to contextualize verbs with. The basic noun and adjective paradigm cards actually do work imho, so I won't be changing those. I also need to fix my synonyms.
Final Thoughts & Next Steps
Overall I am very happy with the results of my studying and I recommend you to do this if you're in a similar situation (read: experienced students only). If you're looking to emulate this, I recommend using resources like the Handbook of Greek Synonyms (available on Archive.org) and Homeric vocabularies by William Bishop Owen and Edgar Johnson Goodspeed (also avail on archive.org) which lists words by how often they appear from the jump.
If you're an absolute beginner, DO NOT DO THIS. Spend at least a few days on the material in each section. Speed can come later. The only reason I was able to do this in such a compressed period of time is because this was entirely review for me. It was either stuff I already knew, or stuff that I knew I had been taught but just forgot. On top of this, I very recently read the Iliad Book 1 in its entirety under the supervision of a professor.
I've seen many threads on various forums on the best approach to learn Greek. Debates about "Grammar Translation" and the "Natural Method" and what textbook or approach is best, but the reality of the situation can be summed up in two statements: You'll get better at what you do repeatedly and doing anything at all is better than debating what the best way to do something is. Do more reading to get better at reading, do more parsing to get better at parsing, do more scansion to get better at scansion. Either way, spending time actually learning the language is going to be far more productive than debating over which textbook or approach to use. It's never too late to try a different approach or change your approach moving forward.
Just pick a textbook, read it, memorize what you think you should, and read some dang ancient Greek.