Greek Vocabulary and a Free Learning Tool

I am doing a lot of yoga to give my foot a chance to recover after my last race. Having to switch from running to yoga is preventing me from doing Greek Pimsleur lessons while working out. Today I went to two yoga classes, sadly Pimsleur-free.

Steel Globe at Columbus Circle

One was an iyengar yoga class. I don’t know what that means, but it was useful. The other was restorative, which seemed mostly to involve lying on the floor and relaxing. By the time I finished the second session I had chanted “om” about four times in one day. “Om” is not a word I am comfortable chanting once.

There is a young guy who sells hot dogs and sodas on a street corner in our neighborhood. I spoke to him this week for the first time. His name is Eslam, and he is Egyptian. He is very friendly and expressed a willingness to help me with Arabic. I tried out a few basic things on him, such as marhabba (hello), shukran jazeelan (thank you very much), and kiefelhal (how are you?). He understood me fine, but when he responded, I did not understand him fine.

That, unfortunately, is how it often goes with language study!

A Cute Starting Point

I am almost done with my Greek vocabulary book, the one I’ve mentioned previously, entitled Your First 100 Words in Greek. I have really enjoyed it! It comes with a CD, but I haven’t played it; I can’t generally be bothered to play a CD that accompanies a book. The thing is, when I am reading a book, I don’t want to be putting a CD into my computer. When I am playing a CD on my computer, I don’t tend to read books.

I like it anyway, CD-free. One thing that made it more enjoyable was ignoring the book’s advice to “not try to memorize the alphabet at this stage, nor try to write the letters yourself.”

Forget that! If I hadn’t had the alphabet mostly memorized first (by doing drills on my own), I would not have enjoyed the book at all. Incredibly, though, I have on numerous occasions since starting this project been advised by self-teaching materials to look at words that are in totally unfamiliar alphabets and just try to remember what the whole words look like.

That makes no sense to me. It’s a little like saying don’t worry about grammar when you write; we can see how that has gone for writing in the United States. Certain basics must be conquered, or more advanced skills suffer.

So: alphabet first, words second. (Part of the point here is that in the face of bad advice, you can make adjustments.)

The vocabulary in this book is divided into various thematic categories, such as animals, clothing, household items, etc. The words I had the most trouble remembering were the “countryside” terms—such as “hill,” “farm,” and “mountain”—which I think makes sense, since I am definitely a big-city girl.

A running friend of mine just told me about a website called Livemocha, an online community of language learners and learning tools. It’s pretty nifty, and also free, at least for basic lessons. I spent a little time going through the Greek beginner-level section tonight and got a kick out of it.