Struggling with Greek

I’m really struggling with learning Ancient Greek at the moment, partially because everything is pronounced and spelt using a completely different alphabet. I don’t really like the tutorial group sizes as I think they’re a bit too big and if you pause for even a few seconds it feels like everyone is looking at you—plus there’s always some smart arse who will butt in if you seem to be faltering, which just makes things even worse.

I understand all the structural elements of the language though, I know what cases are, the definite article, subject/nominative and object/accusative etc. and I can explain them without any problems. For some reason though I can’t get my head around actually reading the text, which I suspect may be a problem. I haven’t really got any confidence with Greek, so I think I will stick at it for the next couple of weeks and then perhaps see what the programme director thinks about me continuing or not.

In a complete contrast to Greek, I found Latin to be relatively easy, at least for the first lesson. I suspect this is largely down to it using the same alphabet as English, give or take a couple of characters, and I can guess parts of the text because I already know English and some French. I’m not sure why but I also feel a lot more comfortable in Latin classes, perhaps it’s the lecturer’s style—she seems to split things up into smaller chunks and not make you feel that you’re on the spot in the way that the Greek lecturer does.

My other course units haven’t started yet so I don’t know how difficult they will be, although I have a meeting to discuss one of them tomorrow morning and I need to figure out exactly what my dissertation will be on as well as finding a supervisor. For tonight though, I’m pretty shattered and have two pieces of languages homework to do, and I’m still not entirely sure whether taking this masters was a good idea or not.