Greek Challenge: 45 Days Report

Forty-four days have passed since the beginning of my challenge learning Greek. What’s up with the challenge? How well am I doing? Well, the short answer is: I’m probably not above the A1-A2 threshold yet thus it is indeed not going as fast as it could have. I expect things to be faster soon, though. I have written a small report about everything I have done so far.

The alphabet

I have learned the alphabet to a point where I can read it more or less accurately now. The only problem with that is that I’m still pretty slow at reading it. I except my reading speed to increase with time, though, thus no worries. I did that by looking up each letter and also by listening to some words read out aloud in Greek. To consolidate my knowledge and to help the website grow I made a Greek alphabet course which you can obviously use to learn the alphabet too.

Apart from learning the alphabet, I also learned the order of them. That was always a glitch in my education. There are only 24 letters.

alpha beta gamma delta epsilon zeta eta theta iota kappa lambda mu ni xi omicron psi rho sigma tau upsilon phi chi psi omega

Not so hard, is it? I have also made a blog post helping you to learn the Greek alphabet yourself.

Conversational basics

I have also learned some basic words. I can talk about myself, about what I do and do not have, understand, want and so on. You know, the A1 kind of stuff. I simply did that by doing Pimsleur Greek and then getting some very simple conversations recorded in Greek to which I would listen. I would read them at the same time to also learn how the words are written.

The preferred technique is to listen to the text before having looked up all of the unknown words and try to see what you can make out of it and then look up the missing words and listen again. There is only one problem with that: I do not like listening to things again. I mean, once is alright and twice is kind of on the limit on boring. That’s why often it’s just one listen with having read the text before and looked up the words I did now know. I kind of think it is a good thing too because I get to try to read it before hearing it read. That’s the main thing I do.

The grammar

What about the grammar? One says that you should not study the grammar but I do like studying some of it. The problem is when grammar study is excessive but just reading up on it and finding the main points is indeed interesting and useful. That’s exactly what I did: I learned some simple grammar from various sources. I did not go into details so that will have to be worked on.

Evaluation and the future

All in all, I have not done as much as I should have. The truth is, I am a bit of a slacker… ;) I plan to work harder during the next 45 days.

I still have a lot of these conversations left to tackle so that’s what I’ll be doing in the near future. I’ll also be having a more heavy focus on grammar. I will do a lot more of this.

My plan is to be able to speak at least level A2 Greek so that I can communicate it with people already when I arrive in Greece on the first of June. I think this is very achievable and while it will not be an extremely efficient use of my time (again), if I do achieve this and then I achieve learning a language to at least the level B2 as I have already declared, I will have shown that it is possible to achieve such things without even having it as a very high priority which will, considering that most foreigners come to a country for months or sometimes years and do not learn the language, be a good point to make.

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