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Sam Eash

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The First Greek Book

by John Williams White

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Sam Eash said: " A very excellent resource that, as the title suggests, is the perfect book for starting the study of Ancient Greek. The book is in the open domain, so it can easily be found for free on sources like Google Books and Textkit.

Logically, the book begin ...more "

Oct 03, 2014 09:49PM · see review

Sam Eash is currently reading

Old English (Teach Yourself)

by Leslie Blakeley

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Sam Eash said: " This book is excellent in some ways, but poor in many others. Its first flaw is that it is marketed towards beginners, when I find the book to be quite intermediate. As an intermediate student, I have no problem with this, for I have chosen this book This book is excellent in some ways, but poor in many others. Its first flaw is that it is marketed towards beginners, when I find the book to be quite intermediate. As an intermediate student, I have no problem with this, for I have chosen this book for the purpose of continuing my studies; yet I find that it would be rather difficult for a beginner to follow along with the explanations and exercises.

The book attempts to gradually introduce grammar, yet I find its attempt rather poor. This is mainly due to its poor organization. Chapter four introduces the verb, and from this chapter I quote: "The verbal system of OE is complicated, and ten chapters of this book will be required for its full discussion." In the mean-time, it simply gives a few conjugation tables for common verbs. Hereafter, verbs are not mentioned again until chapter eight; in between these chapters are the declensions of nouns, which is something that should have been taught from the very beginning. Then, we learn about i-mutation in chapter twelve, which is a criminal offense to me. I-mutation should either be taught before or during the discussion of verbs. Otherwise, the student is going to be confused and wondering why the verbs so often change vowels in the present stem.

The exercises are very advanced. Right off the bat, before we are given an explanation as to how to conjugate a verb, and having only been given a minimal introduction to the declension of weak nouns, we are given an exercise: a translation exercise of the parable of the prodigal son. This is far too advanced. I have no idea how a beginning student could possibly be capable of translating such a passage, which, by the way, extends to two whole pages in length.

Some of the pros are that the book is quite in-depth on issues like pronouns, sound changes, history, etc. In addition, one particular aspect I like is that it is full of vocabulary. The vocabulary is so expansive, it might even be too much, but that is a direction that is better to err in anyways. The vocabulary is listed in categories like "nature, living things, household, body parts" etc. Another cool thing about the vocabulary is that it contains derivations: that is to say, it will introduce a word, and then introduce related words, so that you learn not only one word, but an entire word family.

All in all, my final opinion is this: this book is very beneficial to somebody who is already familiar with old english, and is wishing to further their studies by gaining a more extensive vocabulary and by practising on rather complex exercises. I would not recommend this to a beginner, despite the book's claims. ...more "

Oct 03, 2014 09:24PM · see review