Greek is one of the official languages of the European Union where an estimated 15 million people speak this language. It is one of the oldest Indo-European languages with the longest documented history over more than 3000 years! Any linguist, whether professional or amateur or folks who love to travel or even the cosmopolitan businessman or woman will agree that knowing Greek is a big help. With modern technology, which includes YouTube, online courses and a whole range of ever growing internet sites, learning a new language is a matter of convenience now, and fast and free too! And yes, Greek is certainly no more “Greek”! Following mentioned an excellent guide for how to learn Greek fast and free.
Tips for Learn Greek Fast and Free:
So here’s a quick list of the various easily available resources from which you can learn Greek fast:
1. Online lessons:
There are various online courses available, in both audio, video as well as visual formats designed to aid in your learning of Greek. These websites provide the modules in an easy and convenient manner. While some of them may be paid modules, there are those too which are free of cost. The list below provides you with a quick reckoner of resources which are free of cost but offer the same level of ease and speed which paid resources would.
This website features a series of tutorials with interactive online modules. An added feature that this website offers is that it also offers homeschooled students the ability to learn Greek with the convenience of learning it at your own pace.
This is BBC’s very own initiative that provides a wealth of information about the Greek language, and the modules provided are designed to induce a quick and enjoyable learning experience. The site advertises “online lessons with audio, games, vocabulary, grammar explanations and exercises”.
The website offers an extensive course that ranges from the elementary to the advanced and if you are interested, in ancient classical Greek as well! Again, this site also offers audio as well as visual learning tools that make your learning experience easy and enjoyable. But the best feature yet is that these online courses are hosted and provided by those same students who have taken the course from this site themselves. This means that the instructors know exactly what challenges one faces when one is in the process of learning Greek. They will have a first-hand understanding and experience of how to help others learn Greek quickly and with relative ease.
“More Americans on this site learn Greek than people from anywhere else in the rest of the world”, boasts the site. With an opening line like that, you can hardly argue! Better still, there are testimonials which will testify to the effect. The website also boasts of the fact that one gets to learn the language first hand from people who speak Greek as a first language.
One of the features available on this website is a repository of Greek literature and other resources which aid in learning the language. The site caters to both the beginner as well as the advanced student aspiring to learn the language. While the beginners can start off with a basic module on pronunciation, the advanced student’s resources range from phonetics to enunciation, important and most used phrases and vocabulary. Once on this site, a student can graduate from one stage to the next with hands on guidance at every phase of his learning experience.
At first glance, one might even be disappointed by the simplicity and the lack of any special visual cues on the site. On the contrary, the website takes Greek seriously. Unlike other websites offering courses in language modules, this website caters only to the Greek language and covers a wide range of aspirants. A beginner would find the audio clips for every one of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet especially helpful. Hosted and compiled the author and teacher Michael Palmer, the website also offers advanced modules for those students who have already been exposed to the language.
“Listen to and copy the native speech, and learn with flashcards and other games” boasts this website. The lessons cover a wide variety of everyday uses of phrases, numbers, colors, days and greetings, etc. For someone who is need of a crash course in Greek, this is the website to be at. The courses are comprehensive and simple to follow and would come in handy for folks who are in need of a quick and easy way to get their way around Greek.
Basically a language tutorial website that advertises to teaching 50 different languages. Their resources are based online and can be downloaded as iPhone and Android apps, with 100 lessons under their belt. The free downloadable apps comprise of audios as mp3 files that contain 30 lessons from their Greek curriculum. Each lesson ranges from frequently used phrases and words to learning grammar, complete with a lesson each for nouns, pronouns and tenses.
UNESCO officially sponsored this site so that it provides free Greek language lessons online; hence it is no wonder that the site provides a very detailed curriculum that starts from reading and writing the Greek alphabets to teaching a more advanced student circle. Each lesson is followed by a quiz or a test that will help provide a deeper understanding of the rate at which a student is learning from the lessons. There are lessons that can be chosen which directly caters to a kid’s imagination and since their lessons are interactive sessions, the tutorials can cater to a wide range of ages. Apart from their impressive resources, ‘About Travel’ also provide links to other good websites that provides free Greek lessons.
2. YouTube Videos:
YouTube is one of the best resources for people who are in search of knowledge and learning. It works especially well for those who prefer videos to simple audio clips or subtitled slides or frames. In fact, YouTube ranks third after Google and Facebook and that is in itself testimony to how it is a trusted resource. The videos on YouTube are numerous and one may be easily lost as one searches for the right video from which to learn Greek. So we’ve done some research and have compiled the list below from YouTube which will help you learn Greek fast and at no cost.
The voice behind these videos goes by the name of “linaaaap”. The video has a wide variety of lessons which she offers starting from the Greek alphabets to pronunciations and using full-fledged words. The video focuses on useful Greek words and phrases for generic topics and rules on grammar too. The instructor writes, “My lessons are very detailed but I try not to use technical terms at least not in the introductory videos. So they are great for beginners.”
This is a 30-minute video which focuses on beginners and starts with a brief history of the Greek language. The actual learning begins at 2:51 minutes and the method is the old school board and marker. The instructor explains each and every letter in detail, starting with how the letter is written as well as the correct pronunciation. The manner of instruction is relaxed and even paced and the deliver is easy to follow. However, this video on YouTube is only a trailer and the full course can be downloaded for an amount from the instructor’s website.
It is a website that caters to teaching spoken and written languages. Claims to be able to teach up to 15 different languages with the style of teaching following 3 levels of instruction and learning – Seeing and hearing the word repeated many times, See and hear a word being spoken a few times while the trainee tries to enunciate and pronounce the words in each segment, see and hear the words being spoken only once while prompted to speak each word in the native language. Most of these videos are less than 20 minutes long and come with pronunciation keys at the bottom of the screen which will be very helpful to clearly understand the speaker.
Voiced by Steve Demme, this video boasts of helping you learn Greek – well, the alphabets in less than 10 minutes. This site is not only helpful but has a very creative concept, where the lessons are created in the form of cartoon characters communicating in English and is then translated to Greek. It is a fun way to learn a different language and at the same time, the video caters to audiences that finds it faster to learn by looking at the lesson visually teaching them rather than just following what the speaker is saying. Unlike the traditional way of teaching the alphabets first, each 1-minute video teaches most widely used terms and phrases that can help you start a conversation.
Voiced by a native Greek, each video is 2 – 10 minutes long. The videos are accompanied with examples for the correct pronunciation and which alphabet to enunciate and how to pronounce each letter. The tutor is also open to questions and conversations that will help you clarify any doubts that you might have. Each letter is explained and pronounced in such a way that it is easy to catch and sure to understand with each example ranging from widely used words in English – The neighborhood tutor has a variety of videos that caters to teaching Greek.
This is a YouTube channel that boasts of a variety of videos that ranges from mind games to providing tutorials for the Greek language. This 5-minute video is a tutorial on how to pronounce and forming the Greek letters correctly by explaining the letters using English alphabets so that it is easier to get the correct pronunciation fast and in the correct way. This is again another tutor that is native Greek language.
3. Free language Apps:
Free Apps that will provide you quick and effective learning tutorials is not only helpful but it is also easily accessible wherever you are in any of your devices. These apps, are downloadable from any store. An easy way to carry your Greek lessons for whenever you have the time to read through them. Here is a list of the free apps that will help –
This is an interactive app that helps you directly interact with the lessons that is provided in the app which can be in the form of texts, pictures or audio. Each lesson comprises of levels that will determine whether you have learned enough to move to the next level.
This is another good free app that will help you learn Greek in a faster and easier way – you can also upload your own lessons to the app and learn the language at a convenient time for you. This app helps in learning frequently used words and phrases.
This app provides a variety of lessons that you can pick from – it starts with the beginner’s lesson and goes up to the upper intermediate level lessons. Each lesson is followed up with a quiz that will help determine if you are ready to move to the next level or not.
This app advertises a wide variety of learning modes such as “flash cards, audio quizzes, spaced repetition, and others”. This app is also user-friendly and allows modelling of the lessons yourself so that it meets your needs and is focused on words and phrases that you are geared up to learn first.
Perhaps the most famous of all these apps is the Google translate app – though not the straightforward language tutorial app, this is a perfectly great way to learn Greek on the job. This app can translate to about 50 languages and has a dictionary that contains up to 30 languages.
Those are therefore your fastest and easiest ways to learn Greek – whether as a hobby or business transaction reasons. Learning Greek as written before, is not so Greek anymore.
