Postby Iversen » Sat Jan 22, 2022 3:16 pm
I didn't say that Modern Greek was dead easy, just that it is simpler than the ancient versions of Greek in the same way that Modern English is easier than Anglosaxon - and having said that, I think that the comprehensibility gab is about the same.
After the fall of the junta the Greeks dropped their mute aspirations and two of their accents, which is a clear advantage for learners. There is however still one big problem in the orthography, namely that several vowels can be written in a number of ways, but since my point of departure is the written language that doesn't bother me much - it's worse the other way round. And then there is of course the stress that has to fall on one of the last three syllables in a word, but not necessarily the one you expect. My rule in the beginning was that it never was the one I expected, but one of the two others. But again: the stress is marked in the writing so there you can see it (not like Danish or Russian, where it is kept as a secret). And then there are a few things in the verbal system which you have to learn, such as the aorist stems, but in most cases they can be guessed.
So I still think that I made the right choice by studying Modern Greek first and leaving the gamut of old forms for later.
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