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Greek Easy Readers (Deltos)

by Νένη Κολέθρα

Stavroula and Manolis, a middle-aged couple, own a kiosk in the centre of Thessaloniki. They work every day from early morning till late at night to make ends meet. One cold and rainy night Manolis does not return home. And then things take a nasty turn…

77 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't find this volume as useful as the first one. The first one I read had a silly plot, but it succeeded in its mission to write simple, easily understood Greek for learners. This one had a silly plot but also elements that make it more difficult for learners to read: non-standard expressions, incomplete sentences, etc.

[Polyxena · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the whole book lacking in plot and quite confusing. I often had to reread section to work out who was reflecting. The good thing about it was learning colloquial terms I hadn't previous come across.

[Drianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

So once I got the hang of how this book was written, I did enjoy it. The formatting was really confusing to me: it's written only in dialogue, no narration, and there is almost no indication of who's speaking, when characters enter/exit, etc. Dialogue tags (even speaker names) would help SO much, because you know who needs all the help they can get? That's right, people reading books with limited language skills. Other than that, though, I did enjoy the story, and I feel like it does a good job showing Greek culture as well (interesting to me that it was set in Thessaloniki instead of Athens, because I know nothing about Thessaloniki). The glossing could use some work: it seemed like poor choices were made on what to gloss/not gloss ("elephant" was glossed, but "plaid" wasn't?); and in one case, I saw a word that was not glossed on one page be glossed on the next page. Also, way too much use of the subjunctive in independent clauses that I'm not confident I understood correctly in context. But overall, fun!

[Dorothy Himberc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief and engaging story.
My issue would be that the dialogues, because they were colloquial, were sometimes missing words that would make the grammatical syntax a lot clearer to beginners in Greek.
Also, co-signing with another reader who was mystified at what ended up getting an entry in the glossary and what didn't. The talk of food and cooking was at times clear as mud.
That said, the main conflict of the plot was easy to understand. (Although the ending, financially speaking, was a little implausible.) I also felt that a few elements were charmingly old-fashioned, and just had to check the year of publication.

[Basak]

: ) my very first Greek book

[Barbara Majewska-Kosik · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5✴️
Τίποτα ιδιαίτερο και όχι πολύ ρεαλιστικό αλλά χρήσιμη πρακτική.

[Michael Barakat · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a nice book to start reading small Greek stories. I felt, however, that the text isn’t that hard since I have a Beta level in Greek language.