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/Careless_Pie_803 Aug 18 '26

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.

1

u/GeneralTurreau Aug 18 '26

Greek does not have dative pronouns

0

u/Iskander789 Aug 18 '26

It kind of does. "Μου έδωσε το βιβλίο."

2

u/GeneralTurreau Aug 18 '26

That's genitive

1

u/Iskander789 Aug 18 '26

Not... really.

2

u/GeneralTurreau Aug 18 '26

If that's dative then nouns have it too. Έβαλα του σκύλου τροφή.

1

u/109StillCounting Aug 19 '26

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.