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Νέα ελληνικά για κλασικούς φιλολόγους
333 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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July 13, 2025
This is a textbook of Modern Greek for students who had first learned Ancient Greek. It teaches Greek solely in Greek, and alongside it the student needs only a dictionary between Modern Greek and his or her own language. Since the grammatical categories of Modern Greek are largely the same as the ancient language, this approach saves a lot of time, since there is no need to explain concepts like middle voice, grammatical gender, the case system etc. when the student already knows them; the book can go straight to presenting the inflection of forms.
The twenty lessons all start with a dialogue, telling the story of a group of European students traveling around Greece with their tour leader. Each chapter finds them in a different region of Greece, so together with the additional reading passages, one gets a lot of interesting details on post-classical Greek history and culture. Within each chapter, some new grammatical concept is introduced, followed by exercises. Crucially, there is a full exercise key at the back, making this book suitable for self-study.
This is a very effective course, provided that one has ample access to Greek people in order to practice all that one learned. I worked through the book over two summers spent cycling around Greece, with long siestas spent in cafés talking with the friendly locals; this is fortunately not a language whose speakers will be aloof and unhelpful. Just a few chapters in I was already able to do some basic socializing, and by the end of the book I was having hours-long conversations over endless frappés and glasses of retsina.
There are a couple of weaknesses to the course. The presentation of the middle and passive is split across two widely divided parts of the book, and the first time around it isn’t drilled enough. The book also doesn’t explain orthographical variance, which is a huge deal in Modern Greek; the spellings one is taught here may differ from other publications and have certain associations that the unwitting student won’t know.
It’s a mystery why this 1999 textbook was produced in such a small run; by the time I first learned of it in the early millennium, it was already a rarity. The Greece it presents (pre-euro, pre-mobile phones, and pre-2008 economic crisis) does mean that, alas, it could not be reprinted without some major changes.
The twenty lessons all start with a dialogue, telling the story of a group of European students traveling around Greece with their tour leader. Each chapter finds them in a different region of Greece, so together with the additional reading passages, one gets a lot of interesting details on post-classical Greek history and culture. Within each chapter, some new grammatical concept is introduced, followed by exercises. Crucially, there is a full exercise key at the back, making this book suitable for self-study.
This is a very effective course, provided that one has ample access to Greek people in order to practice all that one learned. I worked through the book over two summers spent cycling around Greece, with long siestas spent in cafés talking with the friendly locals; this is fortunately not a language whose speakers will be aloof and unhelpful. Just a few chapters in I was already able to do some basic socializing, and by the end of the book I was having hours-long conversations over endless frappés and glasses of retsina.
There are a couple of weaknesses to the course. The presentation of the middle and passive is split across two widely divided parts of the book, and the first time around it isn’t drilled enough. The book also doesn’t explain orthographical variance, which is a huge deal in Modern Greek; the spellings one is taught here may differ from other publications and have certain associations that the unwitting student won’t know.
It’s a mystery why this 1999 textbook was produced in such a small run; by the time I first learned of it in the early millennium, it was already a rarity. The Greece it presents (pre-euro, pre-mobile phones, and pre-2008 economic crisis) does mean that, alas, it could not be reprinted without some major changes.
Displaying 1 of 1 review