Any other Greek speakers or people who want/are learning Greek (Modern or Ancient)?

I'm going to start ancient Greek next year and I can't wait! I am a Mediterranean archaeology student but I'm mostly interested in Rome. This makes ancient Greek very important to learn. I also want to be able to read ancient Greek literature and philosophy. I don't think I'll ever have the opportunity to learn modern Greek but you never know, you might be able to convert me from the Roman side ;D

Haha well Rome and the Greek city-states have many things in common! Plus Greek and Latin have many common roots, like Ego, which in both languages means 'I' or 'myself' (loan from Greek ). Anyway, If you learn Ancient Greek then modern Greek is a piece of cake! Well pronunciation has changed, but ok thats easy to learn

I'm currently learning Classical Greek of Xenophon. I just want to be able to read ancient Greek texts. That's about it. I don't have much interest in poetry or prose. I'm more interested in world accounts and some philosophical works, mainly Stoicism.

Yeah we did Xenophon in ancient Greek class in school last year. It was very interesting!

But we don't learn the classical pronunciation of the letters, we use the modern Greek pronunciation :/

I don't like modern Greek. It sounds awful to my ears. But so do other languages of the Balkan sprachbund. I can't really put my finger on what do I dislike about them. Sometimes I can listen to them with interests, but sometimes I just can't stand hearing them. Same thing with Russian too.

Ancient Greek on the other hand (from recordings by scholars I listened to) sounds a bit like Hungarian, it's very melodic and pleasant.

To me ancient Greek sounds REALLY weird. It has sounds that don't exist in modern Greek, like ü and ō, and I find it very funny, being a speaker of Modern Greek. But oh well, the present pronunciation has been around for 2000 years, so yeah...

But Greek sounds very different from all the other languages of the Balkans (Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian etc).

French and German sound pretty much the same to me also. Go figure.

How do we even know the Ancient pronunciation? Isn't it a stab in the dark?

Linguists have come to a conclusion - don't ask me how