Italian Athenaze

A couple weeks ago I finished my first read through Italian Athenaze. What a trip.

What?

Italian Athenaze is not a book about learning Italian. It's a book for learning ancient Greek written in Italian. I don't know Italian, but I still got a lot out of this book. It's great practice and a good story.

Greek textbooks come in different flavors. Back in the day, the ones I started off with were very heavy on grammar and patterns but light on reading. And what reading they had tended to be collection of disconnected sentences chosen to fit whatever vocabulary and grammar had been covered, the real focus. When it comes to reading, this textbook is the opposite. In this book the narrative takes center stage. Though you'll notice the authors have lots of explanatory text about Greek (in Italian), you find a pages and pages of continuous narrative in Greek throughout. You'll see the same characters over time, see them relate, see them live their lives, and watch them encounter and attempt to overcome difficulties. And there's a lot of narrative. Chapter 1 has four pages of continuous Greek narrative. Chapter 8 has 22. Chapter 16 has 20 pages. I'm guessing there's well over 200 pages of continuous narrative. You'll see a whole lot of this:

If you want to take a look at it, you can find the entire book up on Archive.org. While you're at it, count the number of pages in the narrative and let me know.

I enjoyed it enough that I decided to order volume 2. Unfortunately, this book, like various others (e.g., I want a few of these) is more difficult to get here in the states. To get this second volume, I had to travel the Internet to Italian Amazon to purchase and have it shipped overseas. I'll get it soon-ish.

Should I Read It?

Yes. The real question is, when? If you don't know Italian, this is likely not a good choice for your first solo Greek textbook. If you look hard enough, you can find a PDF online that has English glosses for the Greek words at the bottom of the page, but you'll still be lacking any sort of discussion of Greek in your language, and you will likely need that.

If you've already got some basic knowledge, you can start using this book. Sure, you may have to look up a few or even many of the words (though less if you find that aforementioned PDF), but it would be worth it. This book gives you much more-or-less comprehensible graded ancient Greek input (depending on your level). I can't tell you exactly when you should be reading it, but this video by Luke Ranieri may help.

I think it could easily be used as a classroom textbook as the teacher can provide various helps and scaffolding to make the textbook usable for non-Italians. Consider finding a few friends that will read it with you. Or join a class. Or consider hiring a tutor to help you through it.

It is a fantastic textbook to use, even if you don't know Italian, and will give you many hours of useful input in just one reading.