Learn Greek for Travel, Work and Study

The alphabet has twenty-four letters and takes a few days, because half of them are familiar in shape or sound and the rest — theta, xi, psi, omega — are famous. The pronunciation is regular once the letters are known: every letter and letter pair has one sound, “d” is the soft th of “this”, “th” the hard th of “thin”, “g” before e and i is a y, and “b” and “d” as English says them are written with two letters, “mp” and “nt”. The accent mark on every polysyllable shows the stress, and stress in Greek is everything: “pote” with the accent on the first syllable means “when”, on the second “never”. The question mark is a semicolon.

The grammar is Indo-European with its own habits. Nouns have three genders and four cases — a nominative, a genitive, an accusative and a vocative for calling someone — and adjectives and articles agree with them; the definite article is used far more than in English, including before names. Verbs are the rich part: two aspects for every action, one for something going on and one for something done once, a passive voice with its own endings, and no infinitive at all, so “I want to eat” is “I want that I eat”, “thélo na fáo”. There is no dative and the word order is flexible, since the endings carry the roles.

Greek has a polite “you”: “esís”, the plural, with someone you have just met, with officials and with the old, and “esí” with friends and family, and with anyone who says “say esí to me”, which Greeks say early and warmly. Titles are light — “kýrie” and “kyría”, sir and madam, with a surname in a formal setting, and then first names. The register of daily Greek is loud, affectionate and physical, with a vocabulary of exclamations — “ópa”, “éla”, “re” — that mean nothing in particular and everything in context, and a repertoire of blessings for every occasion: “kalí órexi” before a meal, “kaló mína” on the first of the month, “kaló taxídi” for a journey.

Standard Modern Greek is spoken throughout Greece with small regional differences of accent; the one dialect a learner meets is Cypriot, which keeps older words and sounds and switches to the standard for anything official. The old formal written language of the state, Katharevousa, has gone out of use but left its fossils in legal and bureaucratic Greek, which is why a tax form reads harder than a newspaper. Ancient Greek is the same language two and a half thousand years earlier: a modern speaker recognises it without reading it fluently, as an English speaker does Chaucer.

An English speaker needs about 1,100 classroom hours of Greek, on the US Foreign Service Institute's reckoning, to work comfortably in it — the group Russian and Hebrew belong to. The alphabet and the stress marks make reading aloud possible within a week; the shared vocabulary means a learner understands a newspaper headline before they can order a coffee; the long work is the verb system and the three genders, which must be heard thousands of times before the right ending comes unbidden. Greeks speak quickly and fold words together, so listening lags behind reading for a long time. Spelling is the one skill many foreigners, and some Greeks, never perfect.

On the islands and in the tourist quarters of Athens and Thessaloniki, English is spoken by everyone a visitor meets, often with German and Italian beside it. Away from the sea — in a mountain village, at a ministry window, in a hospital corridor, at the kafeneio where the men play tavli — Greek is the only language, and Greek bureaucracy, which is famous, runs entirely in it. Tourism and shipping hire in English; most other employers, the public sector, schools and the courts expect Greek, and the professions require it. Universities teach in Greek, with a growing number of English-taught master's programmes; a foreign student bound for a Greek-taught degree learns the language first.

• Yes sounds like no: “Ne” is yes and “óchi” is no, and the gesture for no is a small upward toss of the head with a click of the tongue — not a shake, which Greeks may not read at all.
• A semicolon asks the question: The Greek question mark is “;”. The Greek semicolon, in turn, is a raised dot, so a sentence can look like a list of questions to a foreign eye.
• Six ways to write ee: Η, ι, υ, ει, οι and υι all sound the same today and each spelled a different vowel in ancient Greek. Greek children spend years on it; foreigners are forgiven.
• Greece is not what Greeks call it: The country is “Elláda”, the people “Éllines” and the language “elliniká”; “Greece” comes from the Latin name for one tribe, and no Greek uses it in Greek.
• Siga siga: “Slowly, slowly” — the national pace, the answer to any hurry, and the first phrase every foreigner adopts.
• Name day over birthday: Greeks celebrate the feast of the saint they are named after, and a Yiorgos or an Eleni is congratulated with “chrónia pollá”, many years, on a date everyone knows without asking.
• The alphabet's children: The Latin and Cyrillic alphabets both descend from Greek, which is why a Greek learner recognises so many letters and a Russian learner even more.

Greek has one state certificate and it covers every level: the Certificate of Attainment in Greek, the Ellinomatheia, issued by the Centre for the Greek Language in Thessaloniki on behalf of the education ministry. It is set at A1 to C2 on the CEFR, each level a separate exam in reading, listening, writing and speaking, held once a year in May at examination centres in Greece and in dozens of countries abroad, with registration in the spring and results in the summer. The B2 certificate is the usual condition for enrolment in a Greek-taught degree at a Greek university, and the C2 is required of foreigners who want to teach or hold certain public posts; the certificate does not expire.

Residence and nationality use the same scale. The EU long-term resident permit requires Greek at A2 together with a knowledge of Greek history and culture, proven either by the A2 Ellinomatheia or by a special exam the Centre runs for that permit. Greek citizenship by naturalisation requires passing the national naturalisation examination, which tests Greek at B1 alongside history, geography, civics and culture in a written paper; applicants over sixty-two and those with Greek schooling have lighter conditions. No short-stay or national visa asks for Greek. A year of classes brings most adults to A2; the B2 a university wants takes two or three, faster for those who arrive with a scientific or medical vocabulary already full of Greek.

Greek suits the self-learner who likes to understand before memorising, and the best free resource for it works that way: a complete audio course that builds the grammar from what an English speaker already knows, one deduction at a time. Around it a learner wants a dictionary that gives each noun with its gender and its genitive, a source of slow real Greek — street interviews made for learners, then the public broadcaster's news — and flashcards that carry the accent mark on every word, since the stress is half the word.

A tutor's chief gift in Greek is the verb. The choice between the two aspects — “I was writing” and “I wrote” are different stems, not different endings — has to be made in every past and future sentence, and nothing but talk, with a listener who interrupts gently every time, makes the choice a reflex. A tutor also keeps the stress honest, hears the “d” and “th” that English speakers confuse, and teaches the blessings and exclamations without which correct Greek still sounds like a textbook.