craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

When I was at McGill, in our intermediate Greek class we translated three books of Homer's Odyssey, studying at home of 50 lines or so per day and then coming to class the next day and reading it over as a group, discussing the nuances and making sure we had the sense right. In order to facilitate this, I wrote my own glosses in the margins, so that I wouldn't have to flip back and forth from text to notebook when reading in class. Here is a picture of my old copy of the Odyssey:

I enjoyed this class, and enjoyed Homer, so I still read some as often as I can (although in the context of all my other eclectic hobbies, that doesn't work out to all that often). I prefer the Iliad, though, so that's what I'm reading. Here's a picture of my Iliad, and with it a picture of how well I've progressed in Greek since college:

There are three big differences between then and now. (I) I now have the good sense to write my glosses lightly in pencil rather than in loud blue pen! This is also because my Iliad is a nice hardcover while my school text was a fairly ugly paperback. (Notes in black pen were written in class; it means I hadn't figured out the right meaning on my own.) (II)There are a lot less glosses. This shows how much my vocabulary has improved—now there are often whole paragraphs that go by without a single gloss, which never happened back in my school days. Back then I usually wrote my glosses in longhand too, for compactness, whereas now I use so many fewer that I can always use shorthand instead. (III) My school text has grammatical glosses ("3 pl perf"); I never need these anymore. Partly this is because I don't have to live in fear of a professor saying, "parse that for me, please", but mostly it is because grammatical rules are rules, and once they are learnt, they stay learnt, whereas vocabulary is a never-ending process of learning.

It's nice to be able to look back and see one's progress like this, especially since I haven't studied Greek anything like regularly since college. Yet nowadays I can do 50 lines in 15-20 minutes, whereas back then took a lot longer. On the other hand, back then I did 150 a week, every week, because it was homework, whereas now I am nowhere near so consistent (I might do 150 in a day, and then not touch it again for weeks). But it's just because I so infrequently have the time to look at Homer that I am so proud to see that I have still managed to make so much progress.