Back to school
One of my winter projects is revision. By this I mean, I’ve decided it’s time to learn more of the Greek language and decided that the way to start doing this was to start again. For me, it’s mainly a question of vocabulary and confidence. I had nearly a year of private lessons before moving to Greece, and my teacher stressed the importance of learning the grammar as well as conversation. Luckily for me, nine years of Latin at school had prepared me for the grammar of language (I can’t remember any Latin though), so when discussing nominative and accusative, definite articles and pronouns, I knew where my Greek teacher was coming from. As an aside, she came from Germany, Greek was her second language and she was studying British law at Brighton University at the age of 24, which kinds of puts my book one of ‘Learn Greek Now’ at the age of 56 into perspective, but there we go, she was an excellent teacher, and fluent in at least three languages.
On Sunday, I took an hour out of my busy day of sofa surfing, and revised chapter one of my book. This did feel like a bit of a cheat, but as my writing skills are pretty rough, I wrote down any word that I couldn’t spell or was new to me. Chapter one is manly about hello and where are you from, which is pretty straightforward, but there were other words and phrases in the instructions, such as ‘put a line through’, which I noted in my ‘list of words I don’t know’, and although outside the remit of the exercises, I tried to learn these too. Chapter one done, I now have the homework book chapter one to complete before moving onto chapter two, which I will do later this week.
And the above photo is vaguely related to this story as I want you to see if you can guess what’s missing from the image. The clue came in a conversation I was having with Yianni on Sunday afternoon when we decided that there high Υγρασία, and the day was Υγρός. Another two words now on my list as, although I know what they mean and I use them (when I remember), I wouldn’t yet be able to spell them competently. Not yet, but then I am still only on chapter one. (The Y, epsilon, is one of several ways of sounding/writing the ‘e’ sound, so until you know which ‘e’ to use, you’re only guessing.)
[Note for the record. I’ve done all of this book before, but not with any great determination or success. Am aiming to change that over the next six months]
