''An Instant Classic About Learning Ancient Greek '' By Mary Norris ''The New Yorker

When Andrea Marcolongo’s book “La Lingua Geniale,” subtitled “9 ragioni per amare il greco” (“Nine Reasons to Love Greek”), came out in 2016, I bought it, in Italian, and took it with me to Greece. I flashed it at a meeting with some highly accomplished multilingual women. “You read Italian?” one of them asked. Slowly, at a very low level, without full comprehension, I should have said. I had brought the book with me to the island of Rhodes because I thought it would be good practice in both Italian and Greek. I was writing a book on Greek myself, and the difficulty of Greek made Italian seem transparent in comparison. I had made it to page 10 of the first essay, on aspect—a property of verbs by which the ancient Greeks distinguished between the “how” and the “when” of an action..
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