Thanks quite a lot follks!
To answer the uncertainty: I haven't quite started studying "seriously". I've dabbled in Mounce before, and given a look-over of Funk's grammar. I acquired what I read to be rather serious resources for study, and then life threw a mountain range or two in the way (16-22 hr work days and public transportation, among others); I have spent the little free time I have had until recently, however, looking up resources, reading papers like Buth's, and trying to form an early picture about what the best approach to lay a good foundation would be. In what I consider another lifetime (though I am quite young) I drowned in a ton or two of Greek vocabulary, grammatical points, and other pointers in serious commentaries, dictionaries, and just reading aloud (as best I knew) the Greek of Nestle-Aland, before seriously considering how just learning it would probably be a greater time saver than having to compare many different authorities for biblical interpretation, so even without sufficient formal study (to say "I can read/speak Greek") "τοῖς τοῦ Ὁμήρου βεβάπτισμαι" is strangely intelligible (though I'm sure I have to be missing quite a lot about it about it).
What I do remember quite well, however, is that after chemotherapy had fried my high school Spanish work from my brain, when I studied Spanish in college it was semi-difficult until I drowned myself in it for two weeks straight (not a lot of demands from other courses at the time): it wasn't that the language is so bad, but coming to actually think in it, speak without having to pause too long to translate, etc., is another story, so I labelled everything around me in Spanish and forbid myself from thinking or saying "door" when I saw la puerta (repeat for everything), read everything in Spanish, listened to Spanish radio, watched Spanish t.v., and suddenly my professores y professoras thought I was amazing for a "first year" student (re-student): it was short-lived due to life circumstances, and other studies demanding attention, but now I want to learn Greek, and I think I have sufficient free time to devote several hours per day. Now if only I can find a decent forum of Hebrew experts to give similar pointers...and really confuse myself : )
Thanks for the info and pointing to those texts. I'll have at it now, and since they're online I think I'll be reading these things while running on treadmills at the gym and sitting in saunas for all the aches due to weights! Will keep searching for audio recordings of reconstructed Homer (there used to be a site but I can't find it in my bookmarks, err...), but besides that, someone here might find this very interesting,
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 74669.html
p.s. loved the mention of "archaeology" of the Greek language: love that sort of thing about languages, the mystery about them, and seeing how things changed between then and later. : )