Greek language guide

Here are some suggestions from Pete based on his (ongoing and probably lifelong) attempts to learn Greek!

 

Being English speaking I can only write about learning Greek if English is your native language. German speaking people here seem to make better progress, I think partly because they are used to a language with a more complex grammar that includes 3 genders for nouns. The Dutch seem to do well, mostly speaking several other languages already. Apparently, if you’re Russian speaking it’s much easier as the language structures are  very similar. 

Rather than putting a few simple examples on this page I think it is more useful to give information about how to go about learning Greek and the resources available. Publishers selling Greek language books avoid, for obvious reasons, one simple very awkward fact: Modern Greek is a very difficult language to learn for English speakers.  It’s level of difficulty is classed as similar to languages such as Finnish, and Hindi; only Arabic, Japanese and the Chinese languages are harder for us. There used to be a column in the Athens News called ‘Learn Greek in 25 Years’ The column was very funny but the title was no joke at all!

The biggest obstacle for English speakers, however, is necessity, or rather the lack of it. English is firmly the international language and will probably stay that way. Where ever we go there is always someone who can speak some English. A little German and French is spoken here but other than that it’s either Greek or nothing at all. Faced with that situation I’m sure we would suddenly find new enthusiasm for the language. Increasingly, when you begin in Greek the reply comes back in English, I’ve witnessed a bizarre situation where someone from the UK was speaking in Greek and the Greek person replying in English for the whole of a long conversation, neither would give way. The Greek was probably thinking - why do I have to listen you your atrocious greek when my English is perfectly good enough? Fair point. 

It’s also important to recognise that beginning with the mindset of failure will produce exactly that. I know a few people who have learnt quickly (years rather than decades), though always through hard work. This is only my personal experience, make of it what you will. What I certainly advocate is to start with your eyes open and keep your expectations flexible!

 

So is it worth the effort? As English is commonly spoken here many foreigners live quite happily with little or no Greek. If you are going on holiday to a tourist destination no-one will expect you to speak any Greek. However, most Greeks really appreciate any attempt you make, no matter how mangled it comes out, and once you are away from the tourist areas even a few phrases and a smile makes a big difference.

 

Before you start learning be clear about what you want, what you can realistically achieve, and how you are going to do it. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time (not to mention money) on Greek language guides and programmes that achieve very little for you - like I did”

 

The first question to ask yourself is ‘Do I want to learn a few phrases so I can say hello, how are you, order a coffee etc, or do I want to be able to speak partly intelligible sentences and occasionally understand the reply? (Forget fluency, it doesn’t seem to be an option!)

There is a world of difference between these two approaches:

 

Phrase book Greek

advantages:

Quick results

You can learn phonetically, no need to tangle with the Greek script

You can be blissfully ignorant of the monster know as Greek Grammar

Even if you intend to learn the grammar you’ll still need to order a beer in the meantime.

A lot of the common phrases are colloquial - directly translating the English equivalent doesn’t work anyway, you have to learn the phrases

disadvantages:

Limited usefulness and you’ll get little understanding of how the Greek language really works.

resources

Finally some good news! There are plenty of good resources out there that are cheap and even free.

Greek phrase books

The BBC Greek Phrase Book is very popular. One I carry around with me is Collins Greek Language Phrase Book and Dictionary. It has well organised sections by topic - everyday talk, shopping, eating out, driving etc and also has a really good short dictionary that has most of the day to day words you’ll need. You get a free 1 hour audio download with it.

Greek language courses

I’ve included these in the phrase book section because most of them are based on teaching phrases perhaps with a bit of oversimplified grammar thrown in that is often plain misleading. Of course, these will hopefully give you more than a phrase book but if you want conversational Greek they are not enough. There are many available, generally a book packaged with CDs, some are expensive. The best value one by far is the BBC Greek language and People. There is a CD set sold separately but the book uses the CD for exercises so you’ll need both. There is a huge amount of good content about everyday Greek culture integrated into the language lessons. The worst I had the misfortune to buy was the Linguaphone course.

Internet resources

The main difficulty you meet in learning phrases is the pronunciation. The intonation and accenting in Greek is very different to English and Greek words are generally much longer, which makes it impossible to learn from a book without hearing it and considerable repetition. It’s easy to play a CD but not so easy to constantly repeat a phrase or word until you’ve got it. This is where the internet and computer based language programmes score highly - by pressing a button you can repeat a word indefinitely.

There are plenty of free resources on the internet, a good starting point is this BBC Greek Language page

The best one for me is a downloadable programme called Byki It works like a PC version of flash cards. That is, there are sets of ‘cards’, each containing a word or phrase, which are displayed in a random order with Greek on one side and English on the other. You can start on either side and then check the answer by flipping the card. The most important feature is that when the Greek is displayed you hear it too. It’s an invaluable tool for pronunciation. There is a free version called Byki Express that has 200 words and phrases, more than enough to begin with. They also have a page on their website called ‘List Central’ which has user submitted lists of cards. The full program which costs about 60 US dollars has 1000 words and phrases.

 

Grammar book Greek

advantages: If you want conversations with real Greeks it is the only option

disadvantages: The time, effort and difficulty involved. Many people give up because of frustratingly slow progress

Why do I have to learn the grammar?

Two things you simply can’t avoid if you want to progress: the Greek script and Greek grammar.

 

You’ll need to learn the script because the precise spelling of words is key to understanding and applying grammar. A phonetic approach doesn’t work when the ‘ee’ sound can be made by 5 different Greek letters and combinations; the ‘e’ sound has 3; the ‘o’ only 2 but which are vital for distinguishing nouns from verbs.

Learning the Greek alphabet isn’t difficult, some of the sounds are awkward to master but not impossible. Then practice reading - if you are in Greece look at shop signs, menus, magazines, anything, and don’t worry about the meaning at first. Phrase books also provide good reading practice. Practice writing the alphabet and words you are learning, it will help you memorise them.

 

For the Grammar you’ll need to get a Greek Grammar text and get on with it. If possible find some classes - but most will be holiday primers. Best of all find a language tutor for one-to-one lessons. It’ll cost you, but a good tutor could save you years of frustration. Choose carefully, not all of them are good.

So what is it that makes Greek grammar difficult? The short answer is ‘everything’ - which sounds facile but for English speakers everything seems different, complicated and randomly pointless with endless exceptions to pedantic rules. (This is also a good description of Greek bureaucracy!)

One big hurdle is that in English we think sentence structure should be subject - verb - object. In Greek whether a noun is the subject, object or genitive is determined by the noun ending, and also the definite/indefinite articles and adjectives vary with it (not in the same way, of course). So the subject can be anywhere in the sentence; you know it’s the subject by how the word ends.

In Greek there are masculine, feminine and neuter nouns all with different word endings for the subject, object and genitive forms, and of course plurals are completely different again. Not only that, within each gender there are 4 or 5 standard sets of variants - all of which have to be learnt.

Verbs are also tricky. The I/you/he/she/it/we/they bit is determined by, you guessed it, the verb endings. For future and past tenses the actual stem (main part) of the verb changes according to a set of idiosyncratic rules. To add insult to injury a lot of the common verbs are irregular anyway, the word changing completely between tenses sometimes.

And so it goes on, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns have their own rules, passive verb forms are completely different.......every new aspect of grammar seems to have its own set of rules to learn.

I hope you can see from this that learning phrases will never enable you to form sentences intelligible to Greeks - you may know what you mean but they certainly won’t.

I make no apology if this puts you off, you’ll need to be self-motivated enough to keep on when you experience this for yourself, the only way is to learn to enjoy the journey - the challenges and victories along the way.

After several years of frustration and wasted time trying to learn from phrases I went back to square one, learned to read and write and studied the grammar. Earlier this year I had some one-to-one lessons with a great teacher, Costas, whose boundless enthusiasm has helped me tremendously. He’s busy running his family hotel during the summer but I’ll start lessons again in the Autumn. I have come to really enjoy the studying and am beginning to appreciate the beauty in the language too - and at last have real hope that I’ll have those elusive Greek conversations.

 

resources

A great place to start is a free internet resource: Modern Greek Grammar Lessons

The main content is a series of 30+ lessons but there is also a pronunciation guide, absolutely essential noun table and excellent short dictionary of  about 500 words. There is also a links page with lots of additional resources. The lessons are clear and well presented. The best feature is that all references to nouns and adjectives are colour coded by gender, you’ll find this invaluable in making sense of word endings. The author asks for a donation which is a fair request given the high quality of the content. I printed the lessons out in colour and have been using it as a main grammar reference.

There are a number of Greek grammar text available. If you have lessons then its best to use the one your tutor recommends, otherwise the best one available is probably: Greek: an Essential Grammar of the Modern Language (see Amazon list to the right). :

 

Greek dictionaries are a problem. Oxford and Collins are the main publishers. The problem is that the dictionaries follow a standard format and make no allowances for the additional complexity of Greek grammar as they are mostly written for Greeks wanting to learn English. Look up a verb and you get the 1st person singular present tense - no future, past, or passive forms even for irregular verbs where the word can change completely between tenses. Look up a noun and many dictionaries don’t even tell you if its masculine feminine or neuter.

The best one is the Pocket Oxford Greek Dictionary - though it will never fit in your pocket. It gives the gender of nouns and at least has a verb table with the present, subjunctive and aorist forms.