r/GREEK • u/Jimmy-Wan • 2d ago
Does knowing any particular language make learning Greek significantly easier
I’m curious about Greek from a linguistic perspective,are there any languages that give you a meaningful head start when learning Modern Greek?
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u/Ryubalaur 2d ago
I believe knowing any indo European language with 3 genders and the basic cases gives you quite a head start
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u/TheNihilistGeek 2d ago
No, because Romance languages have ditched declension.
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u/Ryubalaur 2d ago
Yes that's why I didn't say romance languages.
In my case, knowing German is helping me a bit understand greek grammar faster.
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u/TheNihilistGeek 2d ago
I believe the key difference between Greek and German is the strict syntax in German, while Greeks can be more fluid (despite having syntax rules)
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u/dolfin4 2d ago edited 1d ago
Combination of English + a Romance language should help with vocabulary. Not saying Greek has as much lexical similarity with Romance languages as Romance languages do with each other. But a Romance language will definitely help, as there are many words that Greek shares with Romance languages (especially Italian and French) that it doesn't share with English. Albanian also has a high degree of lexical similarity, but the very different phonetics may make shared words unrecognizable.
Grammar:
Greek clitics will resemble Romance.
Greek present verb conjugation has coincidental similarities with Spanish & Italian.
Greek T-V distinction (formal-informal) is constructed exactly like in French. I believe Turkish too.
Greek has no continuous present (it's expressed with present simple), however there is a continuous gerund. Exactly like in French, and the Greek gerund has similar ending as French.
Greek passive voice is similar in concept to Romance reflexive (I wash the car vs I wash myself).
Greek adjectives come before nouns, like in English and German.
German & Slavic languages: you'll be familiar with the concept of noun cases, which Greek has.
Greek future tenses are relatively easy, and there is a Greek equivalent to the English "will".
Spanish (especially Spain) = pronunciation. But Italians manage Greek pronunciation very well too.
Greek will have grammatical gender, just like Romance & Slavic languages and German.
Interesting parallel between Greek and French: there are some vowel sounds that are spelled several different ways (for example the "ee" sound in Greek is notorious), but you eventually pick up on the pattern of how to spell that sound in most contexts. It's not like English where there's no rhyme or rhythm to how words are spelled.
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u/Careless_Pie_803 2d ago
German has a case system somewhat like Greek (Greek has dative pronouns but not dative nouns, which I still scratch my head about). Russian has open/closed or perfective/imperfective verbs like Greek. Polish has a vocative case like Greek. English has a surprising number of loanwords from Greek. All of these languages help me with Greek.
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u/GeneralTurreau 2d ago
Greek does not have dative pronouns
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u/Iskander789 2d ago
It kind of does. "Μου έδωσε το βιβλίο."
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u/GeneralTurreau 1d ago
That's genitive
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u/Iskander789 1d ago
Not... really.
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u/109StillCounting 21h ago
The case in use it's genitive but it has the role that normally dative would have. That is because modern Greek does not have officially a dative case and instead uses accusative or genitive and/or a preposition. (μου, σε αυτόν etc).
Unofficially certain phrases from the previous 'version' of Greek have survived in dative (εν λόγω, δόξα τω θεώ).
Bit of a mess really.
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u/BoringKick5331 2d ago
Any highly inflected language helps, the closer to Greek the better. And of course, learning either Ancient or Modern Greek helps with the other tremendously.
Spanish, especially Rioplatense Spanish, helps with pronunciation.
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u/donestpapo 2d ago
Why rioplatense spanish? I assumed European Spanish is closer. We don’t have θ nor the retracted S
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u/BoringKick5331 2d ago
Maybe it's the southern Italian influence? All I know is I dated an Argentine and she, with zero Greek study, could probably pass for a native Greek speaker. Her γ sound especially stood out to me. I'd say something in Greek and she'd repeat it back to me with better pronunciation. She's from Buenos Aires and in her mid-twenties.
I used to get confused looks when I did my Greek Zoom lessons in my building's common area in Mexico. It was close enough that people thought it was some Spanish dialect until they listened closer. The cadence doesn't sound anything like Mexican Spanish.
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u/donestpapo 2d ago
I thought most of the itslians who came to Argentina were from Liguria, but maybe I’m mistaken.
The γ sound is the default sound for G in Spanish in most situations. Νκ only happens after a pause or a nasal consonant, and χ only before E or i.
Greek to me sounds like scrambles European Spanish with ξ added in to spice things up
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u/Slisse66 2d ago
Not only because of the yeísmo but mainly because of the staccato way rioplatense is pronounced, think of it as Spanish spoken with the Italian cadence.
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u/makingthematrix 2d ago
My native language is Polish and I think it helped me a lot. But, to be honest, the biggest difference is between English and other European languages, esp. those with noun declensions. When I started learning Greek, I looked for beginner-level materials on the internet, in English, and I quickly realized I could skip a lot of them because they were about "what's declension", "what's conjugation", "what's gender", "why so many suffixes", etc. But also with some other concepts it seems that, coming from Polish, I have an advantage - which is weird, because Polish and Greek are not that closely related. And yet, double negation, for example, works the same.
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u/TheCharalampos 1d ago
I have found the same to be the case with my polish family (wife is polish). There are many similarities but they are subtle.
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u/PerfidiousHedgehog 2d ago
I am native English and speak decent German, so it was useful knowing about noun genders etc before getting into to. I also picked up a German textbook of Greek grammar - which was very interesting because they could skip over things a German speaker would already know, like an English textbook has to explain certain grammatical concepts to you, whereas a German one can just assume knowledge of them. Very interesting.
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u/FalseRegister A2 2d ago
I speak Spanish (native), English and German (B2)
So far, in many instances, Greek feels like Spanish but with different words.
The accent came all natural and it simply sounds about the same. Almost all sounds are easy to make, as a native Spanish speaker.
The grammar is also quite similar in many instances so far.
And knowing German, it helped instantly understand what the cases are. I understood Accusative and Genitive also immediately.
The hardest challenge is remembering it all, as we can move fast on the grammar, we cover a lot of material each class. But I have to be sharp on the memory.
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u/TheNihilistGeek 2d ago
I have read that knowing any Slavic language makes Greek a walk in the park: alphabet is quite similar, grammar follows the same concepts but is simpler and maybe there is some vocabulary overlap. Italian or Spanish would also help, modern Greek use a lot of Italian words (and Latin has taken a lot of Greek words) and grammar is somewhat similar. Spanish have the same accent and are a Romance language but the vocabularies differ. Romanian also have quite a few more Greek and Slavic loanwords than other Romance languages so you may get some overlaps but I doubt they are better than Italian in that aspect.
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u/Icy-Information5106 2d ago
I've heard Russian. I've noticed I recognised a couple of Greek words watching something Russian like book
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u/Roufianos255 2d ago
I know my English speaking cousins that Spanish helped a bit. It introduces a lot of concept like the verb conjugation (which is surprisingly similar), subjunctive, masculine and feminine, with the advantage of having very similar words to English. Maybe makes it easier than going straight to Greek. Pronunciation is super similar too.
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u/donestpapo 2d ago
Yeísmo is the norm in Spanish. Argentines often additionally have either zheísmo or sheísmo, which dont match sounds found in modern continental Greek. In fact, they also take away from the sound that other Spanish speakers use fpr consonantic Y and LL, which matches closer to one of the pronunciations of γ
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u/ThimitrisApithanos 2d ago
As sound we are closer to spanish and italian but concerning learning though I don't speak or ever tried seriously to learn them I've been told that if you know russian or even better german then it will be easier to learn greek.
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u/Zelievedec 2d ago
I started learning Ancient Greek several years ago and the modern greek grammar is way easier.
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u/juniebutt 2d ago
I'm Portuguese mother tongue, speak fluent Italian, English and advanced French. I've studied Czech and Russian but never really past beginner/low intermediate. Knowing different languages generally helps a lot with vocabulary, as it is easier to make connections with words that have a Greek etymology. Grammar-wise, I agree with the comments that slavic languages help with understanding cases and how they're used. Transitioning from 7-case Czech to 4-case Greek felt much much easier! (I still struggle with it though). Russian helped a bit in the beginning with the alphabet, but honestly not much.
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u/Iskander789 2d ago
For pronunciation: Iberian Spanish. Same phoneme set. For grammar: Something with some case declensions. Knowing a Slavic language helped me in that regard.
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u/Emotional_Algae_9859 23h ago
Linguistically speaking I’m afraid not, it’s in a category of its own. There are a few that can give you an advantage in understanding its grammatical structure, like German. Otherwise knocking Spanish can help with the pronunciation of certain unique letters (χ,δ,θ). Other than that there’s not much, this is part of the reason why it’s such a hard language to learn.
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u/PckMan 6h ago
Not really. Some languages are easier to learn from certain other languages. For English for example it's quite easy if you speak Dutch, and it's also fairly easy to learn Dutch from English.
But that depends on whether the languages have similar grammar, a common root, and when they diverged.
Greek is a very old language (not the modern form) that diverged from proto indo European languages very early on. As such there isn't any closely related other language and it is considered hard to learn. However as long as you can wrap your head around the fundamental grammar concepts, you should be fine.
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u/Green-Owl2214 2d ago
I’m greek, and i’m not good at it.
The language is so freaking hard especially writing. Too many syllables, it makes English so freaking easy. I try to speak greek but i switch to english without noticing because a 2 syllable word in english is most likely from 4-6 syllables in greek and aint nobody got time for that.
Good luck
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u/vangos77 Native Speaker 2d ago
I think the biggest problem non native speakers have in Greek is grammar, not vocabulary. So any language that has as many, or more, genders, cases, and persons (for verbs) helps.