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Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4638 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian
| Message 57 of 231 19 December 2012 at 4:55pm | IP Logged |
Cristina, I am also a true beginner, but when I start taking a new language seriously I like to have a good set of resources from the start. Guess I am just becoming (over)ambitious with regard to Greek - I have to watch out, as my main focus should still be Russian...
I like the idea of "Greek for dummies" - I have a very slight preference for keeping it in this thread, but no strong feeling about it, so I leave it to our leader to weigh the pros and cons and make a decision.
Also, nice to see that we have a godfather.
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5864 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 58 of 231 19 December 2012 at 5:03pm | IP Logged |
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
I am getting slightly nervous by all the very advanced beginners here, but I'll try to defend the corner of "the true beginners" :-). Crush - please tell me you are on my level! |
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I wish i could say we're at the same level, but i think even if you've never studied Greek before you've got a higher level than i do. What little Greek i know is thanks to borrowed vocab from Spanish and English. ;) Jack just helped me figure out the Greek keyboard the other day (not that i can actually type anything meaningful, though).
The resources i've got lined up so far are:
-the three Language Transfer levels
-Assimil : Le nouveau grec sans peine
-FSI
-Aprenda griego sin profesor
more or less in that order. I've flipped through the FSI briefly and the setup seems much closer to the Spanish course (the French and German courses were much duller i found, and the Mandarin course was full of useless vocab).
This site lists lots of resources as well:
http://personal.us.es/raquel/grimod_link1.htm
For example:
Greektube: vídeos, programas, series, etc.
Greek-video.net: películas, series, etc.
Livenet.gr: televisión online
Edited by Crush on 19 December 2012 at 5:08pm
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6141 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian
| Message 59 of 231 19 December 2012 at 6:56pm | IP Logged |
Γεια σας! Χαίρομαι πολύ που θα είμαι ο νονός για την ελληνική σας ομάδα φέτος. Λατρεύω την Ελλάδα, την ελληνική γλώσσα, και τον ελληνικό πολιτισμό. Ελπίζω που θα μάθετε πολλά ελληνικά φέτος, και που στο τέλος του χρόνου θα μιλάμε όλοι μαζί ελληνικά. Αν χρειάζεστε οποτεδήποτε βοήθεια με τη γλώσσα, πείτε μου και θα σας βοηθήσω ευχαρίστως όσο μπορώ.
(In English: Hello! I am very glad to be the godfather for your Greek team this year. I love Greece, the Greek language, and Greek culture. I hope you all learn a lot of Greek this year, and that at the end of the year we will all be speaking Greek together. If at any time you need help with language, let me know and I will gladly help you as much as I can.)
For those of you who don't already know me, I'm ellasevia and will be your team's "godfather" for this year. As I understand it, a team's godfather/godmother is a native or advanced speaker of the language who follows the team members throughout the course of the year and offers any help or guidance they may need with the language they are learning. I'm not a native Greek speaker, but my family is Greek and I've been exposed to the language ever since I was very young through interaction with older relatives and summers spent in Greece. I always get very excited to see people learning Greek and love to help out however I can. I'm looking forward to working with all of you this year!
Καλή τύχη σε όλους!
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| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5831 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin
| Message 60 of 231 20 December 2012 at 2:00am | IP Logged |
Γεια σας ellasevia! Χαιρο πολύ. Looking forward to learning lots from you. I'm happy to say that I understood your message in Greek without having to read the translation, although some of the words are new. My first question to you, why do you use που after Ελπίζω, rather than ότι? I have noticed this use of που after certain verbs before, but haven't been able to figure out any rule.
Steve
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| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5831 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin
| Message 61 of 231 20 December 2012 at 2:22am | IP Logged |
I uploaded a pic. It appears on my profile page, but not on my posts. Anybody got any idea why?
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5864 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 62 of 231 20 December 2012 at 5:55am | IP Logged |
I think you need to be a Pro (paying) Member for that.
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| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5394 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 63 of 231 20 December 2012 at 7:05am | IP Logged |
I don't think I saw it mentioned yet, but there is a Michel Thomas course available for Greek as well - both a Foundation course and an Advanced course.
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| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5765 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian
| Message 64 of 231 20 December 2012 at 8:06am | IP Logged |
Crush is right, unfortunately. You have to be a paying member to have a picture show up
on your posts.
@ellasevia - Our Greek godfather has arrived! I'm looking forward to this challenge
even more now that we have an enthusiastic godfather to learn from. Also I was
wondering where the name "ellasevia" comes from. I'm surprised I've not asked you that
before actually.
@ Kerrie - thanks for mentioning Michel Thomas. I'll add that to the resources post.
@ Cristina - don't worry about all the advanced beginners. I can read Greek for the
most part but I've found recently that there are even holes in that. I know a fair few
words but that is where my knowledge stops. I will need to start right from the
beginning of Griechisch Ohne Muehe just like you - I may well progress quickly as all I
need to do is strengthen what are at the moment very rickety, unstable foundations, but
the fact remains that we will start at the same place. You will also recognise so many
Greek words from roots in English -
γλώσσα - "glossa" - language.Think of the English "glossary".
βιβλίο - "vivlio" meaning "book". Think of "bibliography" (as you'll see, this
one has two Greek roots in it as do many of the words mentioned below). You could also
think of "bibliothèque in French or to use a relatively uncommon word in another
language, "biblico" in Spanish.
In Classical Greek, beta - β - was, logically, pronounced "B", but in the modern
language it's pronounced as a "v" which sort of screws up my examples of any roots in
English with beta in them. The pronunciation of beta in Modern Greek is something that
irks me slightly but I imagine it's something I'll get used to and in time get to like.
I still catch myself pronouncing it as a "B" a lot of the time!
γράφω "grafo" - I write. Think of "graphic, graph, graphite etc...
φωτογενής - "fotogenis" - photogenic. This one's easy - photo etc...
βιολογία - "viologia" - biology. "bio", or "vio" in the silly modern
pronunciation, is a Greek prefix for stuff pertaining to "life".
αστέρι "asteri", meaning "star". The root "aster" has to do with things referring
to stars - asteroid, asterix (which is star-shaped), etc...
χρόνος - "khronos" meaning the concept of time. "Chron" is anything to do with
time. Chronology, chronological.
γεωγραφία - "geografia" - geography.
γεωλόγος - "geologos" - a geologist. "Geo-" refers to earth.
αέρας - "aeras" - the air. The prefix "aer-" is do with the air.
ανθρωπολόγια - anthropologia - means "anthropology". "Anthro" pertains to
humans.
αρχαίος - archaios - arch- or something similiar to that points towards great age.
The example is an adjective meaning "ancient". English words with this root would be
"archaeology" or "archaic".
χρώμα, χρωμόσωμα - "chroma" and "chromosoma" mean "colour" and
"chromosome". The root "chrom-" refers to colour.
ψυχολογία - psychologia - psychology. The root "psy" has to do with the mind.
Also in Modern Greek I believe the "p" in the prefix "psy" is pronounced, which I find
a bit odd.
Also, the Greek suffix -λογία means "the study of..." as I'm sure we all already
know, which makes βιολογία (viologia) "the study of life".
I hope this goes a little way, Cristina, to settling your worries, at least where
vocabulary acquisition is concerned. There are loads of Greek roots still used in
English and in other languages - I glanced at the Wikipedia article on
Greek and Latin
roots in English after writing this (from memory) to see how many roots there
were that I didn't mention - and the list above hardly scratches the surface as you'll
see if you look at the article
The only thing you may have got from the details above that may be problematic is that
there is a fair bit of redundancy in spelling - If I understand right, there is no
difference between the pronunciation of omega - ω - and omicron, which is "o". There
is also no difference between the pronunciation of eta, iota and ipsilon - η,ι and υ
respectively. Knowing you find spelling difficult, I'll try to think of a way to make
this easier, but I'm having trouble with it in Modern Greek now. In Ancient Greek there
were reasons for these different spellings, but they were lost as Greek developed.
Also please don't shoot me down if my transcriptions of the words above aren't spot on
as I am sure they won't be. They're approximations (which unfortunately has a Latin
root, not a Greek one) and I think they'll do for now.
Hope it helps! Be not discouraged by the awesomeness of Greek. We will all conquer it
together.
Edit (one of the very many times I'd edited and extended this already ridiculous post):
Greek is seriously cutting into my planning time for classes! All I want to do is read
Greek!
Jack
Edited by LanguageSponge on 20 December 2012 at 9:21am
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