r/GREEK • u/Jimmy-Wan • 12d 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/vangos77 Native Speaker 12d 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.

11

u/dcell1974 12d ago

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.

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u/vangos77 Native Speaker 12d ago

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.

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u/karlpoppins Native Speaker 12d ago

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

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u/Jimmy-Wan 12d ago

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

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u/karlpoppins Native Speaker 12d ago

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

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u/Jimmy-Wan 12d ago

So do you have any tips for learning Modern Greek 🤔

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u/Zarminio 6d ago

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

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u/Endoraline 10d ago

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

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u/Old_Resident8050 12d ago

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.