As much as I am embarrassed to admit it my Greek proficiency is dismal. Since university in the late 1960's with only four semesters of "Classical Greek" at that time I really have not studied the language of my forebearers to any degree even allowing my modern Greek to go so dormant as to be nonexistant. I had always planned that upon retirement I would take up the pursuit in earnest and eventually be able to read/translate works and writings of one of my favorite historical figures: Emperor Manuel II.
Well, that day has come and now I must decide whether to begin anew where I started forty years ago with Homer or go straight to Attic.
This may be a silly dilemma but I am really stuck.

Any advice especially from the self-taught members (and George, of course) would be appreciated.

Glad to hear from you and the great decision to translate Manuel's writings. Starting from Homeric Greek would grant a complete experience of Greek, however, if you prefer speed, in order to start as soon as possible the translation project, perhaps you'd better begin from Attic Greek.

Thanks for the encouragement and advice. I called my old college roommate with whom I've not spoken in forty years. He majored in Greek and, as I found out, has spent his career as a Greek instructor at a Jesuit prep school here. Besides catching up somewhat he mirrored your advise and thought I should restart with the same text we used in college back in the 1960s. Thankfully I still have that text (Chase and Phillips); and I also have already been using two or three from the textkit site as well. I have both the abridged Liddel and Scott lexicon and the BIG one. I should be good to go.

Reviewing the optative now...it can get confusing.

Also trying to download some initial source material for translation (may as well practice on my target) but am having a more difficult time with eMule than I've had in the past.

Thanks again. I am SURE to have questions.

It can be a little difficult in the beginning, but a couple of hours each day will get you soon to the texts. And it will be easier to speak modern Greek too, even if only because the vocabulary is common.

It seems the referenced host of the Migne Patrologia Graeca has discontinued that hosting. I did locate my target texts as a Google scanned text - poorly made but better than none.
Hopefully the high quality versions will be put up somewhere else soon.

The best way is with eMule ( www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/fathers/migne-patrologia-graeca.asp" target="_blank">https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/fathers/migne-patrologia-graeca.asp ), although you need to let the program open to download whenever it finds sources. File Sharing Sites such as Rapidshare discontinue hosting if a download does not have the popularity of Michael Jackson...