It’s been more than three weeks since my intro post so here’s a mini life update: I’m learning Ancient Greek. Precisely, I got a copy of Athenaze Book I (the UK edition) a couple of months back but I’ve only started working through it right now.
Greek is a pretty scary language. While its five-case noun declension system isn’t that bad, certainly not as extensive as Finno-Ugric languages, its verbal conjugation system is massive to make up for it: conjugation for person (first, second, and third) and number (singular, plural, AND dual), as well as three voices – active, passive, and this weird thing called the middle, which seems to make transitive verbs reflexive – and the tenses and moods you probably recognise from Latin (except for the aorist, but I don’t even know what that is). There’s also a whole bunch of rules about accenting and enclitics and proclitics that you’re advised to remember for composition.
That’s not to say that Athenaze whacks you around the head with all this stuff from chapter 1 – so far, it has introduced new grammatical material at a fairly sedate rate. It does introduce all the noun cases in the singular for certain nouns in Chapter 2, which was actually quite refreshing given my secondary-school Latin experiences of being drip-fed all the cases over the course of a couple years.