Week Two of My Greek Learning and Goals

Some part of me doesn’t like goals very much. Sure, they are an effective means to get things done but they stress me out sometimes. I put pressure on myself and blame myself later for not following through with some goals completely. I don’t like that part. I don’t really see any other way to progress steadily, though, that’s why I still have to set goals for myself.

Talking about goals for this week, I have to do what is left. It is my third week, I have about two weeks and around 22 lessons of Pimsleur behind me. I also have started learning the Greek alphabet but I have not progressed much with it. Here’s the idea: I plan to finnish Pimsleur and finnish learning to read the Greek alphabet this week. I have 8 lessons left and there are four days left in the week which means that I will have to do two lessons a day which is not that much. I also have some readings teaching how to pronounce the letters in the alphabet and their combinations. Since it is easy to learn something well by teaching it and since I also have to keep up my goal of at least one language course a week, I plan to kill two birds with one stone by finish with my alphabet-learning and complete this Greek alphabet course by the end of the week to help me consolidate my knowledge and help other future learners learn the Greek alphabet. I am aware that such spontaneous learning of the alphabet will still probably mean I will read slow and make mistakes but I know I will be doing reading afterwards to correct for it so I don’t worry very much about it. Thus my second goal for this week is to learn to pronounce the Greek letters and the major combinations of them.

Apart from my Greek studying, I also continue following my university studies and I have still been doing some limited learning of topics such as the study of argumentation, the moral theory of Immanuel Kant, Ancient Greek mythology (which is very much related to Greek), or comparative religions. On top of that, I have also been reading the book called “How I Learn Languages” by a polyglot who knew 16 languages. I have done around 100 pages this week and here I give a very dense summary of her advise for the readers of this blog:

Read!

What will the goals be afterwards and how will I progress with my studying? Well, I do not want to tell you exactly how yet. I just want to tell you that I decided I will be willing to try out a lot of different learning methods soon. I know a method that I will be using that will allow me to learn the language no matter what but it is kind of classic and I wonder if it is the best one. I will like to test some websites, chat-rooms, learning methods and whatnot simultaneously. I will, of course, be limited to just testing them a bit because a few days of trying it doesn’t do justice to any method but at least I will be able to tell you how I feel about it.

Here’s the final goal I have set in addition to this challenge: learn about the culture as well! Greece is not only about the language so I will be trying to learn its history and culture as well. I have already picked up some material to learn about the Greek history and Greek mythology which is a very fascinating subject that I was always going to but never had the time to learn much of. I will also try to learn about the distinguished Greeks and what their ideas were about and I will finish my pre-learning with the basic geography of Greece.

In summary, setting goals will be an important part of this challenge. I will have intermediary goals and statistics and ideas and actual content in Greek to report back to you so it should be fun.

Similar Posts:

• How To Learn The Greek Alphabet
• First Week, Review of Pimsleur Greek and First Impressions
• Greek Challenge: 45 Days Report
• Rough Greek Overview: Modern Greek From A Learner’s Perspective
• Attacking Greek From All Sides: Podcasts, Practice, Progress. History.