Is it realistic to learn Ancient Greek on your own at least at

In my last year of high school (don't worry, I am 18) and I've had 5 years of ancient greek so far, this year being my 6th. I dropped latin 2 years ago in favor of ancient greek (doing both is for the diehards who I respect very much but I could never do such a thing) and I am still worse at translating ancient greek now than I was at latin 2 years ago.

Ancient greek is hard as fuck, even if you're familiar with latin already.

Well ok, but it's not that I necessarily want to read and translate difficult texts like Plato. I'd just to know overall how the language works and it would be nice to understand the Greek origins of words in other languages.

>>8698197
Well, start with the alphabet. First thing we learned in our textbooks after the alphabet were some modern words derived from ancient greek, like

>despotes
>poietes
>turannos
>an-arxia
>eu-thanasia
>philo-sophos
>kata-logos
>pro-logos
>basis
>diploma
>dogma
>drama
>theatron
>planetes

The list goes on and on. Mind you, these are rough conversions to the latin alphabet as it's a hassle for me to actually type in the greek alphabet.

Well, I'm German and was just considering to get textbooks for German high school students studying Ancient Greek.

>>8698247
Go ahead mein freund. But what are you expecting to be able to read?

Well, it's rather a general interest. I think that in Germany, there's like two different levels when it comes to Ancient Greek. The lower one is that you are to read the New Testament and the higher one is that you can actually read philosophy like Plato.

>>8698255
I haven't read the New Testament in ancient greek but I bet it's pretty complex aswell. With other languages I've read I am actually able to read texts and books, while with ancient greek I'm translating very slowly and not directly reading.

But maybe you are very motivated and some kind of progidy. How well did you learn Latin?

I don't even want to get to that level. Latin wasn't super easy for me, but not really hard either.

In Germany, high school students usually take 3-5 years of Ancient Greek. Maybe my realistic goal could be to be as good as a mediocre 3 year student?

>>8698281
For what purpose though? It wasn't until after 3 years of Ancient Greek we got to read an original text and not stories made specifically for the text books we used.

>>8698281
If you're from germany maybe it would be a good investment to taka a course at the VHS or even a crash-course where you lern the basics ins 6-8 weeks (assumed you have th time and money).

>>8698153
It's realistic if you have good discipline and work regularly. You definitely need a good course book for the grammar and vocabulary (can't stress enough how learning vocabulary helps). I personally went through and would recommend the Ermaion, but that's in french. Also practice by reading bilingual translations (one page in greek, the other translated) and understanding the syntax.
Herodotus seems like a good place to start once you have the bases down because it's prose, concrete narrative, and quite interesting.

>>8698286
>It wasn't until after 3 years of Ancient Greek we got to read an original text and not stories made specifically for the text books we used.
Jesus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5IPArDxO40
I started reading native material for children relying on a dictionary after two months of starting Japanese.I know more Japanese in this time than I do from 3 years of German and 12 years of Irish in school. I thought I was bad at languages but it turns out school is not aimed at anything more than learning a few common phrases to sound like you know something

If you've done Latin then you will eliminate most of the difficulty of learning Greek because the concepts are all quite similar

What is harder in Greek is morphology, there is a lot more memorisation work

Try Hansen & Quinn or JACT Reading Greek (2nd ed). Just pirate H&Q and try ten chapters or something to see if you can handle doing all that morphology.

The language itself isn't super hard. It's just all the memorisation that sucks.

Sorry to hijack, what do you folks recommend for Latin learning? I was going to pick up whatever course book seemed alright at the library, just to try it out, but I've read in discussions bout Wheelock and the like that the methods of certain courses can actually be harmful in the long run.