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Rating: 
Summary: A practical introduction to spoken Greek.
Review: A practical introduction to modern Greek, K. Matsukas does a fine job of teaching the reader to cope with situations likely to be encountered when travelling in Greece. While the book is organized into chapters covering specific themes (e.g., ordering food at a restauant or discussing the weather), it by no means a phrase book. Each chapter builds on previous chapters, challenging the reader with more complicated constructs and scenarios.The real strength of this book is the focus on fostering the development of an intuition for the language, which can be far more useful than grammar tables of conjugation and declension forms. While it does include limited grammatical instruction, the grammar presented tends to focus attention on the resulting unanswered questions and unresolved ambiguities. As a consequence, I found it very beneficial to utilize a grammar in conjunction with this text. (I used the excellent Routledge grammar, ISBN 0-415-10002-X.) For the most part, however, the issues I encountered centered on the finer points of grammar and would not prevent the reader from developing a basic working knowledge of the language. The optional audio cassettes include readings of dialogues preseneted in the text. They proved quite useful as pronunciation guides. However, the speakers (no doubt out of necessity) tend to over-enunciate. As a result, the cassettes do not provide a very realistic example of the spoken language. I would highly recommend supplementary exposure to spoken Greek (news broadcasts, movies, conversations with native speakers).
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