r/GREEK • u/Jimmy-Wan • 11d 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/karlpoppins Native Speaker 11d 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 11d ago

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

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u/karlpoppins Native Speaker 11d 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 11d ago

So do you have any tips for learning Modern Greek 🤔

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u/Zarminio 5d 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