When I was learning Ancient Hebrew, before I decided it was useless to me and switched to Modern Hebrew, I used many sources on the internet, obviously, they are not as authorative or structured as a university class would be, but they all listed pronunciation like Modern Hebrew: ayin is silent like aleph, hhet and khaf are pronounced the same, tet and tav both have the value /t/, etc.

I suppose that's the most common way of teaching but I got a grammar which explained the original phonology and also went into some depth on etymology. Very interesting.

Anyway I won't hijack this thread anymore. It's all Greek to me.

I've always pronounced Koine Greek like Modern Greek. I pronounce βλεπω like vlepo, NOT blepo. My seminary instructor was Greek, and he always pronounced ειναι as ene and not eynai

In my Greek class we just pronounce things how we feel. Yep, that's right no one's wrong. Mostly, we use pronunciation conventions that are convenient and their correctness isn't considered.

My pronunciation of Greek is quite influenced by my native language. I basically read everything phonetically, every letter one sound, and I almost always ignore diphthongs and digraphs.

That works for a written language, I suppose, but I'd assume if you were speaking Greek you'd want to pronounce it the way natives do.

I personally prefer to read things accurately even if it's a dead language. It often makes spelling easier, for one thing.

Not really. I like "barbarian" accents rather then the native ones.

So in all the languages you're learning, you make no effort to sound like a native?

Would you pronounce γύρος [ˈʝiros] like ['giros]?

I don't see the point of learning a foreign language, if you're going to let your accent be so bad that no one understands you anyway. I mean you'd have to relearn a lot if you become use to the "barbarian" accent, instead of just learning it the right way they first time.

I think I'd pronounce it as ['gyrɔs].

I don't learn languages so that others can understand me. I learn languages so that I understand others. If in the process I attain enough skill so that others understand me too then that is just a lucky consequence.