*Best downloaded on a computer!*
As of Nov 2025 NOW WITH CLASSICAL ATTIC PRONUNCATION
(the original 2020 edition in Samosatene Lucian Pronunciation is included in this download)
This purchase includes:
• 8 hours 12 minutes of audio files teaching all the regular and most important irregular grammatical paradigms of:
- nouns
- verbs
- adjectives
- pronouns
- cardinal, ordinal, adverbial, and distributive numbers
- and more!
• An Excel spreadsheet document with 30 sub-sheets treating these paradigms, used for tracking your progress to total memorization!
Professor William C. Dowling of Rutgers University publicized his method to learning Latin at his webpage two decades ago (which appears no longer to be active):
http://www.wcdrutgers.net/Latin.htm
And I have adapted his method to Ancient Greek, with a strong emphasis on auditory and spoken input to increase the speed and permanence of memorization.
INTRODUCTION TO THE METHOD
“The problem with Latin is that you can study it for six years and still not be able to read a Latin sentence,” writes Professor Dowling, who published his Method nearly two decades ago on a webpage that can still be found today:
http://www.wcdrutgers.net/Latin.htm
Note that this webpage no longer appears to exist,
but you can see facsimiles of the webpage in this video: https://youtu.be/_yflqUWKVVc
While William Dowling applied his technique to Latin, and I followed it achieving great success, I have adapted it for Ancient Greek.
The original Dowling Method is as simple as it is effective:
Stage 1) Understand the general idea of the grammatical cases and tenses of Ancient Greek.
Stage 2) Memorize all the regular and most important irregular grammatical paradigms of inflected nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
Stage 3) Immerse yourself in a graduated reader such as Thrasymachus, Thrasymachus’ Catabasis, Athenaze, Logos, Alexandros, Reading Greek, or Ancient Greek Alive.
Compared to other Ancient Greek language pedagogical techniques explored in the 21st century, which predominantly (and, I would like to affirm, correctly emphasize the need to treat the teaching of Ancient Greek like any other modern language), Stage 2 of the Dowling Method seems to be the most out-of-step with those more modern practices. I can understand the hesitation. Teachers around the world have embraced the speaking of Ancient Greek in the classroom, along with the extensive reading of texts, as the best way to attain literate fluency, and have eschewed unnecessary emphasis on grammar-translation. Indeed, the ability to speak Ancient Greek is necessary to true reading fluency, as documented by Dr. Randall Buth.
So why would I advocate a method that requires the memorization of grammatical paradigms? Because it can potentially be very helpful. The sheer variety of Ancient Greek case and conjugation forms is frankly daunting, and often appears irregular (though once you master the system, it’ll all start to seem much more regular than at first glance). It can be horribly discouraging to read a seemingly simple text, and yet not understand what it means because you can’t recognize what part of speech you’re looking at or its conjugated form, puzzling whether “is this a participle or finite verb? or is it a noun?”
Thus the central stage of the Dowling Method is the memorization of the paradigms; but how is this accomplished? Professor Dowling says that you should transcribe each of them, by hand — 100-200 times. And while this is certainly important for Latin, it is even more critical for Ancient Greek, since Ancient Greek has four times the number of grammatical paradigms to be learned, and most of them (especially of the verbs) more elaborate than their Latin equivalents.
In my application of the Dowling Method to Ancient Greek, I have augmented the process with force-multiplying steps, adapting the Dowling Method into a doctrine of my own that I have used with great success both autodidactically and with students over many years.
Here are the stages I recommend:
Stage 1) Understand the general idea of the grammatical cases and tenses of Ancient Greek. (This is the same as the standard Dowling Method.) To get an overview of the Ancient Greek grammatical system, I can recommend the Wikipedia page on Ancient Greek grammar (just skim it; don’t try to perfectly understand all of it! it’s far too detailed for beginners), or read some of the chapters in the free online textbook Ancient Greek for Everyone.
Stage 2) Memorize all the regular and most important irregular grammatical paradigms of inflected nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the following manner:
a. Write out a given paradigm by hand while pronouncing the words aloud, so that you reach the point where you can look away from the page and recite the whole paradigm from memory (the paradigm is now in short-term memory); then:
b. Repeat the paradigm aloud to yourself, marking each correct repetition on a scorecard to keep track, at least 100 times.
c. Utilize the attached audio recordings to teach and prompt yourself to recall the inflected forms.
Stage 3) Read a lot of Ancient Greek, building up your skills to basic reading fluency. There are a few ways you may achieve this:
a. Graded Readers. There many graded readers that can help you on your journey to acquiring reading fluency. I mention a number of them in my video about the Jonathan Roberts Approach to Ancient Greek.
One of these I have recently adapted into as easier and more extensive reader, called Thrasymachus’ Catabasis.
b. Bilingual Translations. It may be possible to go directly from a basic knowledge of the accidence (the conjugations of verbs and declensions of nouns and adjectives) straight into reading with bilingual translations, such as can be found for free on websites like Perseus, or in editions by Loeb, etc. I have spoken about the utility of this approach in this video.
(If you have access to audio either for the graded readers or for the original literature, you should also use the Alexander Arguelles “Shadowing” technique, which I discuss in this video.)
Additionally, one may take a class, or perhaps find some other way to learn the language. In any case, it seems certain that reading fluency in Ancient Greek is only achievable through a great deal of reading. That said, the stickiest part about reading Greek is the accidence: the morphology of nouns and verbs and all the rest. If you can commit most of the regular and several of the irregular patterns to memory, you have a fighting chance!
Stage 4) Transcribe each chapter of your graded reader of choice as you work through it, whether by hand or by typing. While transcribing, the auditory and spoken component is essential, saying each phrase aloud, then saying it again as you transcribe it, then saying it a final time as you read your own transcription. (This is Arguelles’ Scriptorium Technique.)
And this is what I call the Ranieri-Dowling Method. It could be employed in part or in toto, and it may work for some people and not for others. I personally vouch for its effectiveness, and I hope you can soon boast the same.
HOW TO USE THE ACCOMPANYING MATERIALS
Your purchase includes an Excel spreadsheet of all the regular and a few important irregular grammatical paradigms, as well a comprehensive overview of all these forms through eight hours of audio recordings covering every one of these tables.
These are your Stage 2 (see above) training materials and scorecard. As this is the most difficult and perhaps most critical stage, I have endeavored to make this part of the process as easy as possible for you, conceiving that you might best proceed in this fashion:
1) Listen to the accompanying audio for a given paradigm while reading it on the spreadsheet. (I recommend you memorize first the article, then nouns, then adjectives, then pronouns, and finally verbs, but you may prefer a different order.)
2) Transcribe the paradigm at least once. Get the paradigm into your short-term memory so that you can recite it aloud without looking at the page.
(For more complex systems like verbs, I call a “paradigm” just the Present Active Indicative or Aorist Passive Subjunctive, for example, not the full conjugation of the verb in all tenses, voices, and moods — eventually you do want to be able to recall the entire table of a single verb from memory, but start out in smaller chunks and work your way through the verb gradually.)
3) Count this as your first sucessful repetition (repetitions do not count until the whole paradigm is in short-term memory, as I explain in my book Ranieri Reverse Recall). Use the side column in the corresponding sheet of the Excel document to track your repetitions. I recommend 100 times for each paradigm.
4) Listen to the audio for the paradigm, and repeat each inflected form aloud (this does not count as a repetition on your scorecard yet); you may do this while reading the table. When you listen to the paradigm again, do not look at the table, and try to say each inflected form before you hear it. If you do so correctly, you can count that as a successful repetition.
a. Audio listening programs like Apple’s Music application (formally called iTunes) track how many times you have listened to a certain audio file on the computer, and and also on your mobile device if the two are synchronized. Take advantage of this automatic tracking to help you fill out your scorecard spreadsheet when you’re away from your computer, such as if you do your memorization training while commuting or while walking/jogging/biking etc.
b. While auditory input is strongly emphasized in the Ranieri-Dowling Method, you may of course write the paradigms by hand or by typing (if you can do so from memory) to count additional repetitions. Just be sure to say the words aloud as you are writing them.
A SOMEWHAT MORE REALISTIC APPROACH
Instead of trying to recite every single paradigm (especially of the verbs!) from memory 100 or 200 times before reading anything, you may prefer to study with one of the above-mentioned graded readers right away. This approach tends to work for most people: as you read any of those graded readers, you’ll eventually be confronted with new cases, tenses, and other forms. That’s a good time to open the attached Excel spreadsheet again, and listen to the accompanying audio recordings, making a point to memorize (or at least review intensively) that paradigm before going on in your reading. This is the mixed approach.
What is most critical, however, is to keep reading Ancient Greek. It can take many years to become comfortable with the language, probably about ten times as much time or effort as one usually has to apply when learning Latin. (See this video on why Ancient Greek is so hard to learn.) If you continue to make progress, getting more input in Ancient Greek, whether through reading or in a class or speaking with others, eventually your hard work memorizing the paradigms will pay off, and the complex accidence will become second nature.
NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION HEARD IN THE AUDIO RECORDINGS
The original release of Ancient Greek by the Ranieri-Dowling Method in 2020 was recited in the Samosatene Lucian Pronunciation of Ancient Greek, a Roman Koine Period pholonogy. To learn more about this, see my video Variants of Lucian Pronunciation. That edition of the audiobook is still contained in the download you received upon purchase.
For the 2025 edition, I have re-recorded everything in the Classical Attic Pronunciation. Learn how to sound out Ancient Greek in the Classical Attic Pronunciation in this video, and how to write the letters by hand in this video.
By carefully imitating my pronunciation, you will acquire a good model for the sound of Ancient Greek in 5th and 4th century BC Athens, including pitch accent, aspirates, and phonemic vowel and syllable length.
NOTES ON THE RECITATIONS
You will hear a peculiar thing in the recordings with the movable -ν, which is suffixed to many words before vowels; in these recordings it has been pronounced as a separate sound from the word in a distinct way to teach you that this is a letter that may or may not be appended to the word depending on its environment. For example, ἦλθε(ν) “he/she went”.
Some of the forms have more than one possible expression; for example, φαίνει “you appear” may also be said φαίνῃ. I have regularly chosen the former in my recitations, but both are correct and Classical as well as Koine. Other forms are hardly ever used at all, such as the synthetic forms of the non-indicative perfect tense; thus I have only recited the analytic forms, such as λελυκὼς ὦ. Where multiple forms exist and I think it valuable to know both, I have recited each of them in turn.
Other forms still you will learn and commit to memory, yet they might not be attested in the literature for those terms. I still think it’s useful to commit what you hear in the recordings to memory, because the goal is to internalize the system of Ancient Greek accidence, so that you’ll have most or all the paradigms in your head that you can recall at any time, to compare them to forms you actually do come across in your studying.
CONCLUSION
Whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or advanced, you eventually have to learn the accidence by heart. While it’s not necessary to memorize every single form you see in the spreadsheet, knowing some or most of them will be extremely helpful as you acquire the language. Ultimately, you will have to find your own path in how you want to commit all these forms to memory, deciding which forms to learn, and which to leave for another day.
This is an intense way to learn Ancient Greek. If you’re persistent, you may discover it to be very effective. I hope you find the spreadsheet and audio files I prepared for you useful in your journey to mastering the Ancient Greek language. Thank you again for your purchase, and if you like this program, tell your friends and please share the link to my audiobooks store. Εὐτύχει!