Greek Study Notes, Page 17,

     Multicolored light, more colors in sentences with lots of pen switching, and some really uninteresting videos that go with this outdated text book.  There is a much better set of free PDF transcripts (with English translation) that go with videos (or was it podcasts as mp3s?) from the Hellenic American Union, if only I had been able to tell my classmates about that site.  Also, trying to take notes in several languages is generally a no-go in an in person class, and although almost all of my classmates claimed to speak Spanish, the idea of using a few Spanish verbs when learning our verbal groups, rather than, or in addition to writing the English translation, also went over like a lead balloon. (If you do speak Spanish, btw, I think I have already mentioned the free YouTube series by Jaunjo Fantoso covering a good deal of Greek, not to be confused with his later Academy videos, which I think require payment, but I’m not sure…)  It’s a shame, because the class really could have been much more interesting.  The way, in fact, that the highly entertaining free Esperanto language teaching series, Teoria Nakamura, on Lernu sets up all of the lessons is both hilarious and highly effective at getting the language (Esperanto, in this case, but the technique is applicable to any language) learning moving quickly and keeping it really fun.  In fact, Esperanto takes a few ideas from Greek, as well as from Hebrew, and even from Turkish, or at least from the Altaic language family, so it is a very interesting language.

     Coming back to modern Greek, on the flip side of this notes page, about my horrendous attempt at drawing a dollar sign to represent money (which is lefta = λεφτά ),  I will admit that this particular word did not stick until a Greek friend used it in a sentence while speaking with me, and then reprimanded me for forgetting the word, since it is such a basic word, and he knew that our class had already (or ought to have) learned it by that time.  That worked.  I was so embarrassed that I never forgot the word after that, when I heard it spoken!  Nevertheless, this is not a tactic (embarrassing a person in order to teach vocabulary) that I would recommend using for language learning.  Stories give enough exposure to words in context that reading or watching videos really helps.  Like watching Sihirli Annem on Turkish Tuesdays (sorry, some of my older Greek friends, I do love that show, and no, Greek friends, you will *not* catch fire and burn if you watch an episode of this show, even in Turkish!!!) helped make Turkish language learning a lovely experience for me.

Still, pretty neat.

Shira

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 Learning from Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing as a means of learning languages, thanks to a character of mine, Sally, who wants to learn “the Grecian language” in order to read the New Testament in the original written Ancient Greek of the Septuagint ( and this Historical Fiction Writing posts page also links to my series of articles on novel writing, and also links to one of my novels still in progress, including my prequel series in honor of

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Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

aka Shira, or:

ShiraDest

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.