Conversational Modern Greek in 20 Lessons

Rating:
Summary: Very difficult to use
Review: I have to disagree with the other review. I found this book very unhelpful. The main problem is that there is no way to use what you have learned, or be sure what you are learning. The book consists almost solely of dialogues (each one written in greek lettering, transliterated into english lettering, and translated, all on the same page). There is also information on sentence structure and grammar, and each dialogue chapter includes a vocabulary list.

What the book lacks is any sort of interactive component. There are no exercises. No passages to translate or questions to answer to demonstrate your understanding. The book basically expects the learner to memorize the stuff by rote, a VERY outdated method of learning languages.


While very basic, "Teach Yourself Beginner's Greek Script" is much more useful, providing plenty of exercises (most of them fun and imaginative) to support the information in each lesson.

Off to find another more advanced 'teach yourself greek' book, I guess.


Rating:
Summary: Great Way To Learn Conversational Greek Quickly
Review: The 20 lessons consist of dialogues that incorporate key vocabulary terms and increasingly advanced grammatical structures. The lessons very capably work in cultural points that would enable an American, or any other foreign tourist for that matter, to seem much less ignorant to the natives. Most of the dialogues focus on everyday aspects of Greek life, including Transportation, Cuisine, Sightseeing, etc.). While the first 16 lessons are translated back into English (with phonetic translations to assist the student's pronunciation skills), the last 4 lessons are longer and more complex passages that are only printed in Greek so that the student can attempt on his/her own to translate and comprehend what he/she has read.

Special features of this book include guides to Greek Pronunciation and basic Greek sentence structure, a 60+ page English-Greek/Greek-English Dictionary, an Irregular Verb List with grammatical conjugations, and a 30+ page Greek Grammar guide.

I would recommend this book to anyone who needs to learn how to speak passable Greek, and only has about 2 or 3 weeks with which to do it. The edition of the book I have has a special offer for a FREE audio cassette. The book and the cassette together are an excellent way to quickly enable you to speak, read, write and understand Greek, at a reasonable level of skill.