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We are not claiming that the information you will find on this website is our production. The amount of data is vast and we have carried out a secondary research in order to find gather all this data from hundreds of different websites, magazines, books etc.
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| Learning Greek |
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Learning Greek is not hard! Go back to the example to realise what we mean. Greek is a language that you will encounter in many of the European languages. So many words of Greek have entered in your own language and at the same time so many words of your own languages have entered Greek!
Many say that the alphabet is so different that it makes it impossible to learn. And we will say that the alphabet is only 24 symbols that you need to know how to pronounce! We Greeks have learnt your languages! It cannot be that difficult for you to learn our own! Use all Greek words you know in everyday life: going to the supermarket, greeting neighbours, asking for directions. You will be surprised by the reaction of the locals! Greek is spoken by few people in this planet, including mostly Greeks, Cypriots and Greek immigrant scattered around the planet! When a local sees you speaking Greek their surprise is such that you are very likely to end up invited for dinner or a drink! Try it! DO not forget there are many ways to learn Greek. Your host organisations should arrange for you a course but also you will have chances to take Greek classes for free that are offered by organisations and municipalities. Check these with the local Youth Information Centres and the main offices of your municipalities. If they cannot find one for you, what do we have mentors for? Ask them to help you with your research. Obviously, these courses are found more often in bigger cities than small villages! But even for the ones that do their EVS in remote places there re online courses! But more than everything don't forget: PRACTICE! PRACTICE! PRACTICE! Online Greek Courses 1. Filoglossia 2. Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki 3. BBC Language Learning 4. Omilite Ellinika - Ziste Ellinika A few words about the language The Greeks were the first Europeans to learn to write with an alphabet, and from them writing was brought to the rest of Europe, eventually leading down to all modern European alphabets. The Greek alphabet has been in continuous use for the past 2,750 years! The Greeks of the eighth century BC were entirely unaware that five centuries earlier, their ancestors in the Mycenaean civilisation had written the Greek language in a script now known as Linear B. This script, finally deciphered in 1952, consisted of symbols representing whole syllables at once. Greek is one of the oldest attested Indo-European languages, known from 1400 BC in inscriptions in a syllabary of Minoan origin. The present alphabet was introduced by a Phoenician called Qadmu (Καδμος) about 800 BC, and has been in use, with a few letters added and removed, continuously since then. The 24-letter alphabet used in Classical Greek is the same one used today. Greek is the official language of Greece. Many Greek words have been borrowed into other languages, so you will find a lot of these words familiar, such as τραύμα (trauma, "injury") and σοφία (sofia "wisdom, knowledge"). Originally they were borrowed into Latin, which became the Romance languages. The changes Greek words underwent in Latin are different from those they underwent in Greek. For instance, in a rare case of someone actually returning a word he borrowed, κινημα (kinema, motion) was borrowed into Latin as cinema, which in French acquired the meaning "movie", and was returned to Greek as σινεμα (sinema). Greek has changed less in the last two thousand years than English has in the last five hundred. It still has three genders, five cases, and movable ν. Although the dative dropped out of use in Greek before the dative merged with the accusative in English, one can still form the dative of μπαγλαμάς (a stringed instrument smaller than the μπουζούκι), even though it belongs to a new declension. So if you know some Attic or Koine Greek and pronounce it as Modern Greek, though you will sound archaic, you will probably be understood. There were many variants of the early Greek alphabet, each suited to a local dialect. Eventually the Ionian alphabet was adopted in all Greek-speaking states, but before that happened, the Euboean variant was carried to the Italic peninsula and adopted by Etruscan and eventually the Romans. The following chart presents the modern alphabet, and pronunciations. |
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