Looking for guidance

Parents Forum
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<p>I have ruled out schools that don’t give financial aid to transfers. My family’s estimated expected contrubution is very low, since my parents have minimum wage jobs, two more kids, and literally no savings. (Just as well, since they won’t be giving me any money.) The cost may end up deciding for me, but if I love the school I figure it can’t hurt to try.</p>

<p>DianeR – I took latin in high school, and have studied on my own since then, using college level books - I’m pretty sure I could test out of 3. maybe 4 semesters. I’ve been trying to teach myself greek, but with less success. I’ve taken non-credit german classes because I know it’s very useful (if not required) for classics grad schools, and I think I’m on my way to having a fair reading ability in it. I’m also taking french now, though I don’t plan to continue.</p>

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<p>Then you shouldn’t have any problem taking both Latin and Greek at the same time!</p>

<p>What are you using for Greek, by chance? We used the Reading Greek program; I call it a program because you juggle all these separate books – really the only disadvantage. I was thinking of studying it myself using, let’s see, I think the author was Mastronarde. I took a look at Athenaze but didn’t much like it. We spent a year at first doing Homeric before moving on to Attic and did like what we used. But for some reason the text is very hard to find – I checked used book sites for months and finally found it on eBay and got it after very animated bidding up to the last minute. Schroder and Horrigan if you manage to run across it (for some reason, the teacher’s guide and the second year text was readily available; it was the first year text that was a ***** to find [I starred myself – I know some words won’t go through!]) …</p>

<p>I don’t know if reading French is useful for grad school in classics or not. I think some Egyptology grad schools require both German and French, although most allow it to be taken at the time. It comes down to whether a lot of the literature is written in the languages and hence would be useful to know, even when one is in undergrad. But then, you probably know all this already!</p>

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<p>I’ve been using Athenaze, which is pretty confusing. I’ll look for the ones you used.</p>

<p>I’ll probably have to learn french eventually, but it’s my least favorite language and the pronunciation is driving me crazy. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to find a reading course.</p>

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<p>Yes, some colleges have reading French courses, and there are also books if you want to do it on your own. My daughter may have to do the latter because for some reason, her school only offers the course in the summer.</p>

<p>It is a funny thing about pronunciation. My husband has excellent French pronunciation but has no mind to remember the language itself. When we went to a French speaking island one vacation he would say beautifully, in French, “I speak a little French.” His accent was so good people would start chattering away to him – and he wouldn’t understand a thing they said. I told him to STOP saying that!</p>

<p>This is the Mastronarde. <a href=“http://www.ucpress.edu/books/sale/pages/5647.html#titles[/url]”>http://www.ucpress.edu/books/sale/pages/5647.html#titles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I’m not good with names; I don’t know how I managed to remember that one. </p>

<p>Somewhere I saw a web site that had reviews of different Greek programs and this was thought to be pretty good. It looked good to me because you can get the answer key. In my searching I found some books that looked well put together but no answer key I could get – which wouldn’t help at all.</p>

<p>You can get an answer key for the Reading Greek series; it is in the study guide book. The teacher’s guide book isn’t useful at all, I found. So we used the reading book, the vocabulary/grammar/exercise book, and the study guide book. The difficult thing is to do the translations – only some of the vocabulary is supposed to be memorized and the other words you are supposed to get from looking in the other book. But the other book is small and difficult to prop open … </p>

<p>I just checked on the Schoder & Horrigan on Amazon. Now it looks like you can get the first volume (used, for $75! yes, people must like it …), but you can’t get the teacher’s manual.</p>

<p>You might also check <a href=“http://www.bolchazy.com%5B/url%5D”>www.bolchazy.com</a>. They have a number of Latin and Greek titles. Just be sure there are translations included. I got a couple little supplemental Greek books from them and they didn’t include the translations. We ended up running out of time and not using them. Otherwise, we would have had to find English translations of the particular works and then find the particular passages.</p>

<p>They don’t make it easy, do they? I think there are more Koine Greek resources usable by do-it-yourselfers, but this wasn’t of interest to my daughter.</p>

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<p>hedgejess,</p>

<p>The subject of Greek happened to come up in another thread. That poster had just taken a course at U of Chicago using Mastronarde and liked it – and had a low opinion of Athenaze also. So I think your problem is what you’ve been using … </p>

<p>good luck</p>

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<p>On another board, someone told me that Cornell College (that’s the one in Mount Vernon, Iowa) has an archaeology program. I just looked at the web site and I see there is a classics/latin/greek department, too. The school is small and isn’t as hard to get into as some of the places that have been mentioned so far.</p>

<p>So it is worth looking into, certainly.</p>

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<p>I was able to get the Mastronarde book through my school library. It’s amazing how much easier to use then the Athenaze it is - especially since there’s a set of online tutorials that help with the alphabet and pronounciation. Thanks for reccomending it.</p>

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<p>Look at St. Olaf in MN. It is in the same town as Carleton, which gets most of the publicity. The one classics major I know went there.</p>

<p>Because of the financial aid wrinkle, you need to apply to a number of schools to compare financial packages. The good thing is that you only have 2 years of college to fund.</p>