MATSEC SEC Greek common mistakes
MATSEC SEC Greek · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Translating Greek word-for-word in Greek word order, producing English such as 'the of the city walls he destroyed' instead of reordering into natural English syntax.
Candidates learn vocabulary as one-to-one glosses and translate clause by clause without restructuring; Greek's flexible order and postposed genitives tempt literal carry-over, and under time pressure they do not reread the English for fluency.
What to do instead
After drafting, rewrite each sentence asking 'how would an English writer say this?' Move genitives before their nouns, convert participles to finite verbs or relative clauses, and place the main verb early. Practise with five short passages a week, producing a literal version then a polished version, and compare the two.
Leaving Greek constructions untranslated or half-translated, e.g. rendering a genitive absolute as a bare noun phrase, dropping men/de contrast, or ignoring an articular infinitive.
These structures have no single English equivalent, so candidates skip them rather than choosing a strategy; they also fail to recognise the participle as a distinct clause because they read only for vocabulary.
What to do instead
Build a checklist of constructions (genitive absolute, accusative and infinitive, indirect question, men...de, purpose clauses with hina/hopos, conditional ei with optative) and, before translating, scan the passage and mark each occurrence. For each, decide a fixed English rendering such as 'when/although X had happened' for the genitive absolute, and check every mark is accounted for in the final version.
Guessing unknown vocabulary from surface similarity to English or Maltese/Italian words and inserting the guess without checking it fits the context.
Candidates want to keep momentum and avoid gaps, and cognate guessing often works just often enough to be reinforced; they do not test the guess against case, gender or the surrounding argument.
What to do instead
Use context first: identify the word's case/number/gender and its syntactic role, then infer meaning from the sentence's logic. Only accept a cognate guess if it fits both grammar and sense. Keep a personal list of 'false friends' and words met in past papers, and learn principal parts so unfamiliar forms can be traced to a known headword.
Confusing middle and passive forms of the present, imperfect, future and aorist, translating a middle as passive or vice versa.
The forms are identical in many tenses, so candidates default to whichever voice they learned first (usually passive for -omai/-omen) and ignore the deponent and reflexive uses that signal middle meaning.
What to do instead
For every -omai/-eto/-sato form, ask three questions: does the verb take a direct object in the accusative (then middle/transitive)? Is it a known deponent? Does 'for oneself' or 'cause to be done' fit better than 'is done'? Learn a short list of common deponents (gignomai, erchomai, dechomai, apokrinomai) and practise voice-identification drills on isolated verb forms before tackling passages.
Misidentifying noun and adjective case endings, especially third-declension forms, and so assigning the wrong grammatical function to a word.
Third-declension endings overlap (e.g. -a, -es, -i, -on can belong to several cases), and candidates rely on word order rather than on the ending plus agreement with article or adjective.
What to do instead
Parse every noun phrase by matching article, adjective and noun in case, number and gender before assigning a role. Learn third-declension paradigms by stem type (vowel, liquid, sibilant) and drill recognition of ambiguous endings in short phrases. When two parses are possible, test both against the verb's requirements.
Rendering particles and connectives loosely or not at all, so that gar, oun, de, mentoi, ge and ara disappear from the translation.
Particles are unaccented, short and carry no lexical content, so they are treated as filler; candidates also lack a mental map from particle to English discourse function.
What to do instead
Learn particles as discourse signals with a small set of English options: gar = 'for/because', oun = 'therefore/so', de = 'and/but/now', mentoi = 'however', ge = 'at least/indeed', ara = 'so/then'. In practice passages, underline every particle and justify its force in the English version; marks are often awarded for conveying contrast and causation.
Answering comprehension questions with unsupported general knowledge about Greek myth or history instead of evidence from the passage.
Candidates who know the background story answer from memory, and the question wording ('what does the writer suggest...') invites impression rather than close reading; they also confuse the author's view with a character's.
What to do instead
Treat each comprehension answer as a claim needing a quotation or close paraphrase from the set text. Underline the exact words that support the answer and, where the question asks about attitude or purpose, identify the speaker and the context. Use background knowledge only to interpret a word or custom, never to replace textual evidence.
Producing accents and breathings incorrectly or omitting them entirely when writing Greek, including wrong accent on enclitics and on the ultima of verbs.
Candidates write Greek as an afterthought to a grammar exercise and treat accents as decoration; rules for recessive accent, enclisis and the acute-to-grave change are learned as lists without application.
What to do instead
Learn the three accent rules (recessive for verbs, persistent for nouns/adjectives, the law of the ultima) and apply them aloud while writing. Practise writing ten short sentences a week from English into Greek, then check every accent, breathing and iota subscript against a dictionary. Pay particular attention to proclitics, enclitics and the grave for final acute before another word.
Translating English into Greek by inserting the English tense directly, e.g. using the present for a completed past action, or the aorist imperative where a present imperative is required.
Candidates map tense forms to their own language one-to-one and do not grasp that Greek aspect (continuous vs simple) governs choices in imperative, subjunctive and infinitive as much as time does.
What to do instead
Before writing, decide aspect: ongoing or repeated action takes present-stem forms, single completed action takes aorist-stem forms. Memorise the contrast with model pairs (poiei/poieson, lege/eipon) and practise converting English sentences that contain 'keep on', 'every day', 'once', 'at once'. Check negatives too: me with present/aorist imperative for prohibition.
Identifying a literary passage's genre, author or context wrongly and then answering questions about it with misplaced assumptions.
Candidates revise plots and names but not the markers of genre (epic formulae, iambic rhythm, prose period, dialogue conventions), and they over-rely on one famous author for any verse set.
What to do instead
For each set text, build a one-page profile: author, date, genre, metre or prose style, main characters, and three typical features quoted from the text. Practise identifying unseen short extracts by listing the formal features visible on the page (dialogue tags, formulae, rhetorical questions) before naming an author, and justify every identification with a feature from the text.