Sunday, October 31, 2004

Greek is a hard language

Classical Attic Greek is a VERY tough language. There are five cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, and Vocative), which can be both singular, dual, and plural. Furthermore, they can be persent, past (imperfect), or future. The typical Classical Greek sentence is more or less structured in order of adjectives and nouns, with a dispersal of definite articles, in descending order of the list above. Then the verbs are at the end. Needless to say, its confusing. Now add in the fact that definite articles can sometimes completly replace nouns in a way that is almost impossible to describe in English. An example: "the (nominative singular femine) [woman] hit the (dative plural masculine) [men]". Then there's the fact that, lacking a Locative case, Greek divides it between Genitive, Dative, and Accusative. Now throw in the fact that the verb "to teach" has somewhere in the realm of some 40 or 50 possible conjugations. Thankfully there are only two main verb forms, omega-stem and mu-iota-stem, so you generally just learn conjugations and declentions by learning single words.

With all this is it any wonder that I'm failing the course?

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