Matsukas - Complete Greek: Teach Yourself

Teach
Yourself

Aristarhos Matsukas

Special thanks for this new edition go to Rebecca Green, Ginny Catmur and Sue Hart, my editors at Hodder Education, also to my students in New York City, Athens, and now in Berlin who have shown me over the years what is important and fun when learning Modern Greek.

I have worked as a professional author and language teacher for over 25 years. I have written language books with special focus on Greek as a foreign language, including a bilingual EnglishGreek, GreekEnglish pocket dictionary. I have lived about half of my life away from Athens, my birthplace, first in the US for fourteen years, where I had studied Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and Applied Linguistics, and now in Berlin for the last nine years.

My accumulated teaching experience of Modern Greek comes from teaching adults and college students in New York City, then Athens, and more recently Berlin. My professional experience also includes among others university teaching in the USA, working as a head of department in a community college in Athens, as a language school director in Ioannina (Greece), and as the translator of three cookery books.

When not at my desk, I can usually be found in the kitchen, in a bookshop, or at a language book fair. I love travelling (having visited more than twenty countries), watching TV, and learning languages.

Aristarhos Matsukas

According to Aristides Konstantinides book Greek Words in the English Language there are 45,729 Greek words in English!

As you work through this course, you will become increasingly aware of Greek loanwords in English although sometimes, you have to stretch your imagination and bend the odd pronunciation rule to spot them. Here are some first examples of loan words: problem, music, politics, idea, programme, system. Have a go at the similar or different exercises in the Practice section of each unit. There are at least ten words in these exercises throughout this book that test your ability to make associations between what you already know and what you are learning. These associations can sometimes be difficult to detect: for example the words (myth), (metre) and (period) are easily detected once you know the Greek alphabet, but the word (book) does not carry an immediate association, although bibliography does.

You might be relieved to know that there are a large number of English loanwords in Greek too, for example complex, stress and camping. Many sports are also identical in both languages, for instance tennis and volleyball. New technology has also introduced many terms in Greek: computer, fax, and email are a few examples. In Greece many signs are in English, including the street sign for stop, the sign WC for public toilets, and even P for car parks. Sometimes, there is a Greek word for these words, but the English word is generally used in everyday language.

Greek is one of the Indo-European languages, with more than 4,000 years of development and history. It is spoken by more than 10 million people in Greece alone and about 4 million people elsewhere. Australia, Canada, the USA, and South Africa still have the largest Greek-speaking populations outside Greece. Apart from the second- or third-generation Greeks abroad, many foreigners, like perhaps yourself, learn Greek in colleges, adult education centres, or private language schools every single year. One of the reasons is perhaps to keep up ties with families, or new relatives, or even business colleagues in Greece. No matter what your reason is for actually wanting to learn Greek, you are about to study a very interesting language, rooted in a deep and rich cultural heritage, and spoken by a very proud nation.

After so many centuries, past works in this language are still relevant in many disciplines including philosophy, drama, the arts, and architecture, just to name a few. New doctors still take the Hippocratic Oath before graduation. Theologians and ordinands still read the New Testament in its original language, and mathematicians still try to expand on Pythagorass theorem after 2,500 years! The rich cultural and linguistic past of the Greeks should not be viewed as an extra burden on your efforts to learn Modern Greek as it is nowadays spoken in Greece. On the contrary, that past should make you aware that learning Greek today can set you apart from other bilinguals or multilinguals who claim knowledge of other major languages. It is not only an advantage to be able to speak Greek; it should also be a privilege and a unique experience! Even in the business world, knowledge of less commonly spoken languages can make a difference when you apply for a new job, so take this as a rewarding experience right from the start and remember you are not the first person to try and learn Greek. Many other language learners have succeeded in the past with this beautiful language and now you will be the next one.

Apart from this course, you can nowadays get so much information through the Internet, from Greek music to online dictionaries or photos from all over Greece or even the new Acropolis Museum in Athens! The Internet can accompany your efforts with this book and can add colour, shapes, and designs as well as enrich the suggestions or topics we are dealing with in this book.

Do not also forget what we pointed out to you in the one-minute-summary. You already know more than you probably think! Throughout the units we try to reinforce and single out certain obvious or not so obvious similarities in both languages. People are often surprised to realize that so many words are almost similar and/ or easy to remember. Let us give you some examples here with Greek numbers: triathlon from tria, for three; pentagon from pente, for five; octagon from okto, for eight; or even decimal or decathlon from THeka for ten. What is also very comforting is that many road signs, or signs in airports, railway stations, or harbours are usually bilingual in Greek and English! This book will, however, prepare you also for some signs you might encounter only in Greek. So the combination of bilingual signs in Greece and familiarity with the Greek script as taught in this book should prevent you from becoming afraid of this new alphabet. Remember also that we will use a lot of transliteration to boost your confidence with many initial vocabulary items that can be tackled this way and so relieve you of an extra burden. So kalimera, kalispera and kalinihta will be greetings and valedictions for you to understand and/or use immediately, rather than having to spend five minutes thinking about their spelling! After all this information, are you ready now to move on and make some progress with grammar?