Books >> Reference

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.