Learn Ancient Greek

From LSJ

Introduction

The resources below are by no means comprehensive, but are a very good start indeed for anyone wanting to learn Ancient Greek. For Ancient Greek queries, you can use the fora.

A typical inhibition is the different alphabet, but this should not be an issue as one can master it in one lesson. After all, the Greek letters are fewer than the Latin ones and most of them are the same.

Moreover, Greek is much easier to read than English, or French for that matter, since it is read as it is spelled.

Ancient Greek Grammars and Textkbooks

PDF books

Web sites

Material in Modern Greek

Dictionaries

Meta-Dictionaries on the Web

These are portals which provide search results from multiple sources.

  • LSJ.gr (containing English, French, Spanish, Russian, Modern Greek translations as well as Woodhouse's English to Ancient Greek dictionary in a wiki format with full, diacritics-insensitive text search)
  • Logeion University of Chicago multiple dictionary lookup tool
  • Lexilogos Dictionaries Search forms for various dictionaries from a single page and other resources.

PDF Dictionaries

Print Dictionaries (not free)

  • The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, Franco Montanari, £61.21 or $110 from the US. This is by far the most authoritative and contemporary dictionary of Ancient Greek with example phrases translated. It brings together 140,000 headwords taken from the literature, papyri, inscriptions and other sources of the archaic period up to the 6th Century CE, and occasionally beyond. Download a 28 page pdf preview
  • Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Robert Beekes, £88 (paperback version) or $125 from the US. Beekes takes full account of Mycenaean Greek, the best and most updated etymological dictionary of Ancient Greek.

Fora