Postby kanewai » Sat May 22, 2021 4:00 am
I've been diligently working on Greek for five months now. It's sobering how much work it's been just to get to a very basic stage. I think, maybe, that a basic A1 level is actually in sight!
I look back on the times where I just flirted with a language - like doing Assimil for a summer, or trying out Pimsleur - just to see how far I'd get. I never get far. It's really taken an all-out multi-pronged approach.
I feel like there are just enough Greek resources out there to reach an A1 / A2 level independently. It's a big change from the FIGS languages, or the main east Asian ones, where there are tons of resources. The combination of Language Transfer, Assimil, and Pimsleur has been working for me. I'd be lost without all three. I do miss having a single, condensed paperback grammar course to refer to, like the old Teach Yourself courses. Those were so common a decade ago, and in a lot of languages; now they seem to have all been replaced by bloated multi-book courses like Living Language's new series.
One unique challenge with Greek has been trying to find good online resources. They are either far too complicated (here are ten pages of charts for all the variations for first declension nouns) or strangely dumbed down (one site, instead of teaching grammar, divides Greek verbs into chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry "flavors").
I finished the first level of Pimsleur this week. And I'm half way through Assimil (75% of the passive phase, 25% of the active phase). I'm going to take a pause with active studying this week, review everything I've done in Assimil to date, and take one more run through Language Transfer. And then I'll push on!
I have a copy of Ο Μικρός Πρίγκιπας / The Little Prince at home. It's going to be challenging, but I think I'm close to being ready for it. It will probably take me a full evening for every couple paragraphs. There are some Greek YouTube readings of the book that will help me through it.
5 x
Super Challenge - 50 books
Italian: Spanish: French: