Modern Greek (Teach yourself books)

By S.A. Sofroniou

Book Overview

Book by S. A. Sofroniou This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0340058064
• ISBN13: 9780340058060
• Release Date: January 1974
• Publisher: Hodder Arnold H&S
• Length: 230 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Excellent introduction to Modern Greek

This book is now out of print, it's the older book from the original Teach Yourself series, but it's better and easier to use than the book currently filling its slot in the Teach Yourself series.

This is the book to get if you want to learn modern Greek

I'm only a couple of lessons into Teach Yourself Modern Greek, but it is already a great learning experience. I'm half Greek and know some things from relatives and others from various books I've picked up over the years. This book does a good job of putting together the things I know with things I didn't (namely vocab and some of the case forms) and puts it into practice. This is not a crazy intensive book where you have to spend a month on a lesson to retain anything. It is actually a more laid-back book that you can work on at your own pace. It seems that, in general, each page works off the last, meaning you build upon what you learned in the last section. There is vocabulary for each section and then examples with translation, fill in the blank exercises and translation exercises. I find these to be a great tool for practical retention of the information presented in each section. When I finish this book, I plan on digging into my copy of Peter Mackridge's The Modern Greek Language, which is an all-out grammar of modern Greek. Another grammar book that just gives you the essentials of modern Greek is called Essential Modern Greek Grammar. Get this if you know a decent amount of Greek but don't understand the grammatical structures (mainly morpho-syntax) that form the foundation of the language, not that Greek is a hard language for English speakers to pick up. All in all, I don't know why I went so long without Teach Yourself Modern Greek. It's probably that it isn't on the shelves at most bookstores and is an older book. Don't let that scare you off though; this is the book to get if you want to learn modern Greek, even if you have no prior knowledge of the language. The hardest parts about Greek for most English speakers will be the lexicon(many words are totally different from their English counterparts and there is more than one word for many things) and the case system. Neither is a tall barrier. Alas, this isn't Russian we're learning here! Once you learn the alphabet and the few nuances involved with the alphabet, you'll be able to read almost anything in Greek (handwriting might still be an issue though it's not far off from typed words. If you have a decent accent when speaking a Romance language, especially Spanish, you will have little trouble getting good at pronouncing Greek. Of course, the only way to get really good is to hear and mimic the spoken language. Easy for me to say, having grown up around spoken Greek (not that I understood most of it). For this I recommend just stopping into a Greek diner and listening to the owners. They usually sit either at one of the booths near the counter or at the counter. Just go where you hear Greek spoken and try to lipsync after them. Sometimes they'll be speaking too fast, but you'll get at least several chances to copy them. Then you can go talk to them in Greek and they'll be more than happy to help you out with your form and pronunciation. Email me at robb

Better than a lot of more recent books

I used this little book to teach myself Modern Greek after giving up hope with a couple of glitzier and higher-priced courses. It really is a shame that this book has been allowed to go out of print because it beats its competition going away. The grammar-based approach to language instruction seems to have gone out of fashion, but for a clearly- written, systematic exposition of how demotic Greek works, this is still the top of the line. The examples in the lessons and the exercises will work very well for learning the language inductively even if the terminology seems intimidating.This book will be very rewarding to anyone who perseveres with it.