How I learnt Greek (in 6 months)

by Santiago Oribe

Normally, when I meet new people around they tend to think that I study some kind of philology or whatever related to languages. In fact, I’m just a physicist who happens to be strongly interested in languages. The reason for this passion of mine is still partly unknown to me, but the thing is that I love learning (about) different languages. Before I tell you about my love story with Greek, I’ll just talk a bit about the history and the peculiarities of this fantastic language.

About the Greek language, First of all, let’s say that Greek belongs to the Indo-European language family, which means that it is genetically related to languages as diverse as English, French and Hindi. Unlike languages such as Latin, which gave birth to Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, etc., Greek has remained essentially the same language for roughly forty centuries of uninterrupted history. This of course doesn’t mean that Modern Greek and Ancient Greek are the exact same thing, it rather means that there’s a continuity between different stages of the Greek language, since it never split -according to most linguists- into different dialects that would in turn become independent languages.

Modern Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and has nowadays about 13 million native speakers around the world. This name refers to the modern standard language, which is to a large extent based on the “demotic Greek”, which was spoken by the vast majority of the people on a daily basis, although it has some influence from “katharevousa Greek” (the learned version of Greek that was used in formal contexts until the second half of the 20th century) and other historical forms of the language. In general, Greek roots are everywhere in many languages in the whole world. Some of the words that have Greek origin do come directly from Ancient Greek (“democracy”, “philosophy”, etc.) or Byzantine Greek (“bishop”, from the Greek ̉επίσκοπος [epískopos], ‘supervisor’), whereas the majority of the words from scientific disciplines were coined using Greek roots, but were never Greek words on their own (“allergy”, for example, comes from the German word “Allergie”, which was created from the Greek words ̉άλλος [álos], ‘other’ and ̉έργον [érgo], ‘work, function’).

My experience

That’s enough theory, I guess. Let me share my experience with you.

Something I don’t like to admit is that I didn’t even know about the existence of Thessaloniki when I first saw that name among the possible destinations for my Erasmus. Whatever the reason for my last decision may have been, the thing is that I tried my luck in this amazingly special city. That’s more or less how my adventure with Modern Greek started.

At the end of January 2017 I met a Greek girl who had come to my university in Spain for her Erasmus. That was essential for what would happen. We became friends and when I chose to come here as an Erasmus student I immediately thought that I’d like to learn the language of the country. I didn’t really expect that I’d manage to get a very good knowledge of my target language in a relatively short period. Actually, I just wanted to be able to communicate with locals and to show them that I’m interested in their culture. I couldn’t have imagined how deep my relationship to the language and its people would have become!! I enrolled in an intensive free online course offered by the School of Modern Greek of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki just one month before coming on Erasmus and I studied the basics of Greek (A1 level) from the end of August until the end of September 2017. In the meantime, I was also following the Greek course on Duolingo. Duolingo is maybe not such an exciting language-learning tool, but it helped me get familiar with the sentence structure and it was also quite useful for learning a lot of vocabulary. On the other hand, the course I took did give me a very good grasp of the fundamentals of Modern Greek.

Me at the top of the White Tower in October 2017

© Santiago Oribe

Even though I was continuously discovering new words, I realised very fast that I wasn’t really making progress and I took the determination to change that. How I did begin to make actual progress is a funny story. Somehow in the end of November I got hurt on a foot while going downhill on a mountain, so I couldn’t walk well for a week and I stayed home. You stay home for a week and what do you usually do? Well, of course you just start reading some slides you have on Greek grammar. And so did I obviously. During that week I spent perhaps a couple of hours a day or more on studying Greek grammar, up to probably B1 or B2 level. After studying a little of Greek grammar, my next step was to start texting my aforementioned Greek friend and some other few people directly in Greek; writing as spontaneously as I could, while trying to recall the correct form for the verbs, the correct cases, etc. By doing this I learnt many words and also some grammar. The good thing about written texts is that you can take your time to think about whatever you will write and you can go over the answers again and again if needed. In December the same year I first went out with people to speak only in Greek. My Greek was very poor, so I could barely speak, but I did learn some new and useful words. Also, listening to the language for more than two hours in a row made me realise how much I was already able to understand and boosted my self-confidence. January 2018 was a turning point in my language-learning adventure for two main reasons. First, I had my exams at university and, instead of studying from four different books in English for my Astronomy – Astrophysics course, I preferred to translate my professor’s slides from Greek into English. This way I learnt a lot of Greek (more formal Greek) at the same time that I learnt astrophysics. The second reason was the fact that I decided from the end of January to speak only in Greek with my Turkish flatmate, who already spoke Greek very well. In the beginning of February I started to systematically attend the language exchange event (tandem) organised by the United Societies of Balkans and I met a lot of local people (some would become good friends) with whom I spoke only in Greek. Not only did they speak in Greek with me, but they also had the patience and kindness of correcting me whenever I made mistakes.

Me enjoying Heraclitus’ fragments

© Santiago Oribe

In the following months I kept practising my Greek, I essentially incorporated it into my life: I talked to Greek friends and more and more to locals in general, I read some articles, I started watching some videos on physics in Greek and then some series, etc. And that’s it. I took an A1-level course, I completed Duolingo’s course and I read a little on grammar. Then I went on to just get as much exposure as I could to Modern Greek and to use it in real situations. I learnt the Greek language by making it a substantial part of my life. The process was somewhat gradual and quite frustrating at times, but the fact is that surprisingly in a period of 5-6 months I got to speak Greek fairly well. I hope that my personal experience will encourage some people, if not to learn Greek, at least to discover a bit of this profoundly beautiful language.