TTC Video - Greek 101: Learning an Ancient Language [Reduced]

After just a few hours of Greek 101: Learning an Ancient Language, you’ll understand why no translation can capture the expressive power of this incomparable tongue. In some ways simpler than English, in other ways more complex, Greek is a delight to study. As you work through these 36 engaging half-hour lessons, mastering the graceful alphabet, the precision of the nouns and verbs, the endlessly flexible syntax, and a vivid vocabulary, you’ll learn words and phrases such as these:

μῆνιν: Pronounced mēnin, the first word of Homer’s Iliad means wrath, setting the tone for the entire epic, which is about the consequences of Achilles’ anger and how it leads the Greek army to the brink of ruin in the Trojan War. In this course, you read the first 125 lines of the Iliad—in Greek.
ἥρως: Once sounded out—hērōs—this word is obviously hero, and such larger-than-life warriors from Greek mythology are the chief characters in the Iliad. After learning the Greek alphabet and diacritical marks, you suddenly see the wide influence of Greek on English.
μαθηταὶ: That’s you, the students, pronounced mathētai, and it’s how Professor Hans-Friedrich Mueller addresses you throughout this course. It has the same root (a verb that means “to learn”) as our word mathematics, and in the New Testament it comes to mean disciples.
μὴ γένοιτο: Pronounced mē genoito, it means literally, may this not happen. More colloquially, it translates, God forbid! and it isone of St. Paul’s favorite expressions, used in Romans 7:13 and elsewhere. In this course, you read many such extracts from the New Testament—in Greek.

Read Greek from Two Monumental Works

With no prior experience required, Greek 101 gives you direct access to a remarkable heritage. Covering all of the topics in a typical year of introductory ancient Greek at the college level, these user-friendly lessons focus on teaching you to read unadapted passages from Homer’s Iliad and the New Testament—two of the most important works in the Greek language, which have for centuries inspired people from all walks of life to learn ancient Greek.

Your guide is Professor Hans-Friedrich Mueller of Union College in Schenectady, New York, an award-winning educator who gives classical language teaching a whole new image. Gone is the drudgery of glacially slow progress that is associated with traditional instruction in ancient languages. Instead, Professor Mueller quickly introduces you to authentic Greek, and he presents his subject with charm, wit, and consummate skill in making Greek logical and understandable.

A Unique Introduction to Ancient Greek

With Greek 101, Professor Mueller has created a course that offers the following advantages for students and self-learners of ancient Greek:

Video course and textbook in one: Keyed to each lesson, the accompanying guidebook includes hundreds of pages of explanations, charts, vocabulary, and exercises with answers. Also included are summary charts, a grammatical index, and glossaries, plus resources for further study.
Multisensory: As Professor Mueller recites in Greek, you see onscreen sentences and charts, highlighting what he is saying and encouraging you to recite along with him. This multisensory approach—hearing, seeing, and speaking—is an ideal way to learn a language.
Ready review: Professor Mueller’s lessons are so entertaining and packed with information that you will want to watch them multiple times. His explanations and the accompanying review and practice materials in the guidebook bring clarity to Greek conjugations and declensions.
A unique approach: Your focus in this course reflects the outlook of the great American classicist Clyde Pharr, who almost 100 years ago wrote, “Homer offers an unexcelled preparation…for all later Greek literature.” No other introductory course combines the study of Homer with the New Testament, as this series does.

You begin Greek 101 by mastering the pronunciation of this beautiful language, using the restored classical (Erasmian) pronunciation. Then you start building your vocabulary and grammatical fluency. By Lesson 7, you are reading the first sentence of the Gospel of John. In Lesson 14, you tackle the first five lines of the Iliad. In Lesson 15, you learn to read Homer aloud metrically. You’ll crack the code of dactylic hexameter, the epic meter that Homer made famous, and will soon be reading his lines with the intonation and rhythms that help you feel the poetry in a way that no translation can imitate. From here on, you read unadapted Greek.

After you finish these 36 lessons, you will have worked through the first 125 lines of the Iliad as well as scores of verses from the New Testament. Think what it will mean to have read these ancient passages just as they were written down some 20 centuries ago and more!

Learn to Read the Clues in Greek Masterpieces

Greek is an inflected language, which means that the base form of a word is altered to show grammatical relationships, such as number, case, and gender for nouns; and person, number, tense, voice, and mood for verbs. Although English uses some inflections, most grammatical information is conveyed by word order or by auxiliary words. This can make Greek challenging for English speakers. The trick is to learn to read the clues. Professor Mueller is a master at showing you how to spot grammatical tip-offs in sentence after sentence of Greek, using as examples some of the finest passages from Greek literature. A sampling:

Iliad, Book 1, lines 1-5: The first sentence of the Iliad evokes wrath over and over, while using the word only once. This is possible thanks to word endings that identify wrath as the direct object of the sentence and connect it to a series of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns.
Iliad, Book 1, lines 43-47: This short scene is alive with participles, or verbal adjectives, describing Apollo’s priest praying for vengeance, and the god’s response—burning with rage, holding his bow, bestirring himself, and resembling in his descent from Mount Olympus the shadow of approaching night.
Matthew, chapter6, verses 9-10: The Lord’s Prayer contains a series of aorist imperatives, used to denote the urgent need for a pure and simple action. The commands are literally, let it be made sacred, let it come, and let it be produced, with more aorist commands following.
John, chapter 2, verse 12: After the wedding at Cana, Jesus goes to Capernaum. Professor Mueller analyzes different translations of the simple sentence that describes Jesus’s entourage, highlighting the difficulty of rendering the subtle meaning of the Greek.

The inadequacy of even the best translation is a theme you encounter throughout the course. No translation can equal the hypnotic effect of Homer’s verse or the mysterious depth of John 1:1. You will discover that there is much you can appreciate while you are still a beginner. After completing Greek 101, you can go in many different directions. The beauty of Sappho’s lyrics, the graceful dialogues of Plato, the stirring historical narrative of Xenophon, the influential translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek called the Septuagint, and many other experiences await you. As Professor Mueller says, “Even when we fail to understand everything, we understand something. And this magic allows the dead, even those who have not breathed this air or looked on the light of this world for thousands of years, to speak to us in their own words.”