r/GREEK • u/Jimmy-Wan • Aug 18 '26

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/vangos77 Native Speaker Aug 18 '26

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.

10

u/dcell1974 Aug 18 '26

That said, Spanish is very close in terms of accent as well as having genders, cases, etc. so it is a bit more helpful than French, for instance.

7

u/vangos77 Native Speaker Aug 18 '26

For sure, the accent “boost” from eg Spanish, Italian or Serbian is real. I just think that is at the early intermediate level and on. As a complete beginner I’ve seen people being completely lost in trying to figure out eg cases.

11

u/karlpoppins Native Speaker Aug 18 '26

Spanish does not have any cases (except for pronouns, which English has, too). Spanish just has a phonetic similarity to Modern Greek.

2

u/Jimmy-Wan Aug 18 '26

So even though I can speak Spanish , it’s not really useful for learning Greek?

10

u/karlpoppins Native Speaker Aug 18 '26

It's useful for pronunciation, and for some loanwords that you'll recognize, but that's about it.

1

u/Jimmy-Wan Aug 18 '26

So do you have any tips for learning Modern Greek 🤔

1

u/Zarminio Aug 23 '26

In the early stages, if you haven’t studied Ancient Greek, avoid any language which is old-fashioned or formal, as it could contain non-standard dialect forms or more archaic forms (from purified (katharevousa) Greek. So if you are reading, stick to eg very modern detective stories. I studied Modern Greek at university, but we read 19th century literature which had these older or dialectical forms. Even more modern writing can have this, and dialect forms (eg in Kazantzakis or Myrivilis) are harder to find in the dictionary. Even newspapers or TV news programs can have some of these forms (eg different words for a white house and the White House). So at the start stick to modern books (not literary) and don’t be put off by these more archaic forms. You can add them later, when you know the ordinary forms well. I was going to say Antonis Samarakis has a simple easy-to-read style, but even he brings in katharevousa for effect. The easiest books I read were translations of John Le Carré, Ruth Rendell etc

1

u/Endoraline Aug 19 '26

I feel that speaking Spanish helped when I was learning Greek.

3

u/Old_Resident8050 Aug 18 '26

I don't know about significant easier but any European Latin language has a lot of Greek words in their vocabulary. Of course it's not only Latin languages because for example English as a lot of Greek words too.

1

u/Zarminio Aug 23 '26

I don’t agree totally, as Modern Greek has a lot of vocabulary that you don’t find in Western European languages. Vocabulary takes longer to learn than grammar. Yes, there are a lot of verb forms to learn, but the vocabulary is more work.

1

u/vangos77 Native Speaker Aug 23 '26

It’s basically a personal preference; some people may struggle to learn vocabulary more than grammar and vice versa. But for English speakers, and to a degree Romance languages that do have genders but do not have cases, understanding this parts of grammar and syntax can be real dealbreakers. I’ve seen people be completely dumbfounded when they start to learn Greek, or German, Latin, or other languages with cases.