Greek Pimsleur: Done!

In Rosetta Stone, I keep encountering a picture of a woman’s lower half in a very short plaid miniskirt. She is bending over to adjust a red calf-high boot with high heel. On her other leg is a tall black leather boot, knee-high. She is apparently trying on shoes in a shoe store, but the main thing you notice is a whole lot of leg, these spiky boots, and very little skirt.

My Rosetta Stone Headset Is in Constant Danger of Being Sat Upon, So I Have Been Storing It in a Fruit Bowl

Brandt was amazed when I showed him the picture, particularly when I added that all it was illustrating was the concept “red or black.” It looks as though it is illustrating something quite different.

I did a whole lot of Pimsleur tonight while lying on the floor stretching (still trying to fix the running injury). I stretched for so long that I finished the sixtieth of the 60 available Greek lessons. There is no third level for Greek, alas; I am done. But since I have just one day left of Greek, I guess that’s not really going to cause me too many problems.

One thing I just learned was that the word for “weekend” in Greek is (with a couple of very minor vowel and stress tweaks) essentially the word for Saturday, pronounced SAH-va-to, fused together with the word for Sunday, pronounced kee-ree-ah-KEE. So when you inquire about someone’s weekend in Greek, you end up saying something that sounds like, “What are you doing this saturdaysunday?” I find that charming.

Here’s another funny thing about Greek: you often don’t have to pronounce n’s in the middle of words. So you might hear “five o’clock” pronounced stees PEN-day one minute and then stees PEH-day the next.

Unfortunately, once I’ve heard a word with an n, any version without the n sounds weird to me, as though the speaker has a cold. Pimsleur has switched back and forth between keeping and losing the n to try to acclimate me, but I have never become acclimated.

It still sounds like a cold.