I suspect a lot of people (though perhaps not the general demographic still reading my blog) will find this advice objectionable. There is a school of thought that hates students using Loebs. And, they have a point. If you think the goal of classical language learning is to (a) internalise Smyth, (b) memorise as much of LSJ as humanly possible, (c) and then produce a translation for the purpose of understanding a text, then Loebs are antithetical to your purpose. That is to say, (again) if you think classical language learning is about developing a skill in translating, then that’s exactly what you should practice.

That’s not a position I hold, because translation is not reading. Or, it’s not reading as a proficient communicative user of a language reads. If you want to read Greek as Greek, without translating (mentally or otherwise), then your goal (and mine) is quite different – it’s to acquire Greek to a degree fit for reading texts without needing to translate for understanding.

Let me define ‘translate for understanding’, as it’s a phrase I’m going to be using more often. What happens when you meet a message (text, for instance) that is beyond your proficiency, beyond your ability to comprehend in Latin at that time? If you (like me) are a recovering product of the Grammar-Translation method, you (can) translate – you take your explicit knowledge of grammar, pick up your lexicon, and make a rendering of the text into your L1 in order to understand it. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s a useful strategy for rendering an incomprehensible input comprehensible. But it’s not reading, and it’s not comprehending in the L2.

And it’s slow. And painful. And inefficient. Which is why, whenever I’m reading something that already has a translation, if the text is beyond my current ability to read with 90-100% comprehension, I use that translation in parallel. Because reading a translation alongside does the exact same thing for acquisition and understanding that doing my own translation would do – it makes the input comprehensible.

So, this is my permission to you. If your goal is understanding a text as quickly as possible, then of course you should leverage a translation. It does exactly what you need, it renders a text beyond your proficiency comprehensible, efficiently. And that let’s you get on with the text itself, with getting meaning out of the text, and increasing the quantity of your overall language input.