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Popularity of Modern Greek | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Jon1991 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5366 days ago 98 posts - 126 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Russian | Message 1 of 25 29 September 2010 at 4:55pm | IP Logged |
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I went on holiday to Greece this summer, Crete (unfortunatly AKA Little Britain - loaded with drunk and violent British tourists) to be precise and I came in contact with a beautiful language and script with a fantastic country loaded with history, culture, delicious food, stunning scenery and an enviable sunny climate.
Despite all these appealling factors, only 371 people on this forum are speakers or are learning Greek. I was wondering why this is? Especially amongst fellow language enthusiasts who appreciate everything about languages from the beauty of it's spoken form, script and where it is spoken. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware that Greek is only spoken by a tiny 13 million people and is confined to a small geographical area but surely the fact that Greek is one of the world oldest languages and with a stunning country behind it, why don't people choose to study it. I'm one of these guilty people as I do not study Greek but I do admire the language, but as I have my heart set on Spanish, French and Russian, I WANT TO STAY FOCUSED. Feel free to add comments :) Jon. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 25 29 September 2010 at 5:20pm | IP Logged |
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Difficulty-to-impressiveness ratio? It's neither Romance nor Germanic, so it's hard to learn, but most people don't know that, so it doesn't give you the bragging rights of, say, Russian.
Also, economy, dude. Basically, most people don't learn languages for the sake of languages. They want their languages to be useful. The super-polyglots are usually exceptions, because it takes a love of languages to be a really successful learner. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jon1991 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5366 days ago 98 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Russian | Message 3 of 25 29 September 2010 at 5:29pm | IP Logged |
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Ari, I knew that Greek has its own branch on the Indo-European language tree.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 25 29 September 2010 at 6:23pm | IP Logged |
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I'm one of those 371 learners/speakers of Modern Greek. My Greek is still somewhat shaky, mostly due to a lack of vocal training and exposure to spoken sources. ... but my impression is that the language isn't too difficult. Dhimotiki has less morphological tables than for instance Spanish, and although there are some specialities in the syntax department which you have learn - partly due to the loss of the infinitive - then there aren't any impossible hurdles. And although some people may find it scary it isn't difficult to learn the alphabet.
The vocabulary is slightly worse because the Greeks have been quite reluctant to adopt international (i.e. English) loanwords - and the numerous Greek loanwords in other languages are typically taken from Ancient Greek or koini, so even if the words still exist in Modern Greek they have often have a quite different meaning. Edited by Iversen on 30 September 2010 at 11:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jon1991 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5366 days ago 98 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Russian | Message 5 of 25 29 September 2010 at 8:29pm | IP Logged |
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Iverson, I have heard many times that Greek is a difficult language to learn in many respects including the fact that it has one of the largest vocabularies of any other language, its grammar is apparently one of the hardest of the European languages and it has a unique alphabet.
Anyways Iverson, good luck with Greek mate! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 25 29 September 2010 at 9:51pm | IP Logged |
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The known history of Greek dates back to the Minoan B tablets, i.e. around 3500 years, and yes, if you look at that timespan then the Greeks have been producing new words for an awful lot of time. And there has in the past century been two competing variants of the language, which also normally boosts the vocabulary of a language. But as a matter of fact I can read books and articles and homepages in Dhimotiki, and my vocabulary in that variant is not particularly big. The other competitor, Katherevousa, is becoming more and more irrelevant for language learners.
As for the scary grammar it is true that Ancient Greek and 'Biblical' Greek (Koiné) had a complicated morphology, and if you look at pages written in these variants then they are also brimming with accents and aspirations of all kinds. But all that rubbish has more or less been cleared away, and even though the spelling still isn't perfect it has become quite manageable. There is no reason to be scared of Modern Greek. You should try it! Edited by Iversen on 30 September 2010 at 11:57am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6143 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 7 of 25 30 September 2010 at 2:24am | IP Logged |
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I'm always disappointed that so few people choose to learn Greek (and when they do, they often mean Ancient Greek), so I often pounce with delight on those who express and interest in learning. I agree that the country, language, culture, and cuisine are all wonderful and beautiful (but I'm biased: I'm Greek) and am somewhat surprised that it's not more popular.
There is a common belief that Greek is an impossible language that nobody can speak but Greeks, but if you just put in some time to study, anyone can learn this majestic language just like any other. Many languages are arguably harder (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Russian...) and plenty of people end up speaking those well. Greek is probably somewhere between German and Russian in difficulty for an English-speaker, perhaps nearer to the difficulty level of Russian, but I might be overestimating the difficulty. Yes, there is a lot of vocabulary, but many of these words are now considered too formal for normal communication or are just not used anymore. And Katharevousa is almost (if not completely) dead... By the way, Crete is really nice! Half of my family is from there (but I've only been there when I was a baby about fifteen years ago) and they speak a dialect of Greek with some different phonology. 'Κ' followed by an 'e' or 'i' sound is pronounced like 'ch' (like 'c' in Italian), so κεράσι would be pronounced as 'cherasi' instead of 'kerasi.' I'm not sure if people still speak like that there besides the older generations, but it's still interesting. :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 8 of 25 30 September 2010 at 11:15am | IP Logged |
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Modern Greek is a pleasant-sounding language. I think its limited extension today (really it is only spoken in Greece nowadays) tends to cut down on the number of L2 learners. In contrast Koine was widely spoken as an L2 all over the eastern Mediterranean and well into Asia, as the second official language of the Roman Empire. I recently saw in a museum a bilingual Roman inscription that had been dug up in Egypt. It was in Greek and Latin. Edited by William Camden on 30 September 2010 at 11:15am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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