Greek Script Hacking: The Optimal Pathway to Learn the Greek Alphabet

by Judith Meyer

Using a unique, tried and tested algorithm, this book teaches you how to quickly and efficiently recognize letters and common words in Greek script. Whether you're travelling and want to understand the words around you, or preparing to learn Greek and want to master the basics, this is the book for you.

In this book you will

· An introduction to Greek script
· Plenty of practice activities to help you recognize each letter of the alphabet
· Helpful mnemonics to make you remember the shape of each letter
· Accompanying audio files so you know how to pronounce letters and words
· Handy tips to help you decipher common and familiar words

The audio for this course can be downloaded from the Teach Yourself Library app or streamed at library.teachyourself.com.

Rely on Teach Yourself, trusted by language learners for over 75 years.

128 pages, Paperback

Published May 14, 2019

Reviews

[Tim Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, part of a series, is a handy little guide to help you learn to read and write the Greek alphabet. This is does very well.

The novelty of the series is that the decision about which order the letters are presented to the student in is made by an algorithm, which aims to make learning as unobstructive as possible. The author happens to be a computational linguist, and has used and refined this approach in learning five foreign writing systems herself.

Not surprisingly, the algorithm tended to choose those letters which both look and sound like their English equivalents as the first ones to present. It does its job, then.

The letters are presented across 7 units, starting with the upper- and lowercase forms, and an opportunity for the learner to practice them. There are regular boxes giving hints about how to remember what the letters look or sound like: 'Think of lambda as a sLIde', for example. Some of these are a little tenuous, but they're what worked for the author, and she currently speaks 13 languages, so she knows what she's doing.

There then follows a block of text in Greek. However, the learner isn't tasked with translating or even understanding; the goal in each instance is to pick out the particular letter where it appears, training the eye to work with the Greek alphabet. Following that comes example words for the learner to decipher, grouped under thematic headings, or identified as words which English took from Greek or vice-versa.

The alphabet is fully covered within five units. The sixth introduces cursive writing, reassuring readers that it's becoming less and less common to see. The final unit shows Greek as it was written from Antiquity until 1982, when 'polytonic' writing was replaced by today's 'monotonic'. (This refers to Ancient Greek's having had a range of tones, which were indicated with diacritics, persisting long after the tones had disappeared from the spoken language.)

The book does what it sets out to, with ample opportunity for practice, helpful hints, and useful explanantions. It's only a short book, which is a great strength: it does everything it needs to without resorting to stretching out the content unnecessarily purely to have a thick spine and high pagecount.

(Disclaimer: I know the author, having co-authored a book with her. She doesn't know I'm writing a review, and if I didn't like the book, I simply wouldn't review it rather than write a positive but inaccurate one.)

[Tanja · Rating 5 out of 5]

This amazing book guides the reader through the Greek alphabet gradually, making it easier to differentiate and pronounce letters. Instead of focusing on translation, it emphasises learning the alphabet. Finding and recognising words with this method gave me an instant boost and made it easier to navigate when I went to Greece.
I also had fun writing the letters in my little notebook as practice, and figuring out how to write my own name and the names of loved ones.
Highly recommended!