Learning Greek

A Study Guide

I think you should use the Duolingo greek course instead, but here are my notes on an alternative.

The Cyprus Broadcasting Company originally broadcast the program Greek By Radio some time ago. It is available online today, in the form of 105 audio files making up the original program, plus corresponding pages with the complete text of each lesson, plus tables of vocabulary, comment boards and chatrooms, and so on.

The following is nothing more than my notes from working through some of the course. It is not a course, it is just my outline, the result of me trying to organize my thoughts and assemble a short summary of what was learned in each lesson. Partly to serve as a guide to finding specific topics, and partly to force me to deal repeatedly with the material and thereby learn a little more.

What should you do?

Do the lessons by listening to and speaking along with their audio files. I found the audio files very difficult to do on their own — I really needed to have a printed copy of the lesson. Each notes page starts with the new vocabulary words for that lesson, possibly a small table showing the conjugation of a verb or something similar, and then it is just a transcription of the audio file's content.

I wanted something that just summarized what the lesson was about and let me quickly review the points, not the details, so I put this series of pages together.

What else could you do?

You could buy a commercial Greek language course.

I did an introductory Italian class from Pimsleur before a trip to Italy, and found Pimsleur's approach to be quite good. It was 20 lessons of 30 minutes each.

A basic and cheap grammar reference also makes sense, such as the one sold by Dover.

How does this course compare to Pimsleur?

I don't think that I'm all that qualified to compare the two, as I have only done the first part of this course and one introductory Pimsleur course in a different language, but I'll try...

Another comment on katharevousa (or καθαρεύουσα) is found in A Traveller's History of Greece, where it is described in less glowing terms:

The Wikipedia page on the Greek language question says, in a note:

Katharevousa came out of an early 1800s dream of getting everyone in Greece to speak Ancient Greek. Katharevousa was archaic, with syntactical, morphological, phonological, and lexical features of Ancient Greek. This meant that it was only partly intelligible to a Greek person without a higher education.

By the late 1800s, it had gotten to where an educated Greek citizen could usually figure out what written Katharevousa meant, with substantial effort, but they couldn't write it. Literacy was suffering.

Then in April 1967 a group of right-wing military officers seized power in a coup d'état. The regime of "The Colonels" as it was known was a time of strongly authoritarian government. Part of this was a link between Katharevousa and the government itself. Demotic or the common Greek language of the people was banned from education. Demotic Greek was criticized as a jargon or slang that didn't even have a grammar, and the language was accused of being connected to communism and treason.

When The Colonels' regime collapsed in July 1974, that was the end of Katharevousa. Article 2 of Law 309 — still written in Katharevousa as all laws were then — decreed that Modern Greek, the Demotic spoken by the people of Greece, should be the only language used in education at all levels. Standard Modern Greek became the official language of administration in 1977, and over the next ten years the whole legal system was converted and rewritten. In 1982 a presidential decree imposed the monotonic written accent system on all education. It uses only the tonos or mark for stress, and the diaresis to indicate separated vowel sounds (as the same mark does in English and French, as in naïve, coöperate, and Noël).

Alphabet

Because of a process called ἰωτακισμός or iotacism, many vowels and diphthongs in Ancient Greek converged so that in Modern Greek η, υ, ει, ηι, οι, and υι are all pronounced the same as ι.