Thursday, June 9, 2022

Learning Greek for and from trips to Greece and Cyprus





 

I started learning Greek on duloingo.com 

I copied the alphabet from Wikipedia.

Some of the letters were also familiar from Hebrew and Russian. Russian and Bulgarian are very similar to each other. Bulgarian is like modified Russian with only a few different letters. Cyrillic, invented by Cyril and his brother, used letters from the Greek and Russian alphabets.

For many English speaking people, the Greek alphabet is challenging. My husband knew theta from mathematics. (His first degree was in mathematical physics.)

On a trip to mainland Greece, I started to recognize the signpost word for Athens. 

I still muddled up the two letters which looked like a circle. On my recent trip to Cyprus in May-June 2022, I saw many motorway signs in Greek and English. I started getting familiar with the letters. I discovered or created a key to remembering which is which.

These are my memory aids

P and R in BULGARIA & GREECE & CYPRUS

The Greek R is written as if they and you are either lazy or in a hurry. The R is half written without the last downward stroke, so that R looks like P. I just keep saying PR, the abbreviation for public relations. I see P and say PR and know that a P is R.

 Another reminder is the name Maria which in Greek looks like MAPIA. Look at it and say PR, and you know it is MARIA. 

I remember my joy in finding that worked in Bulgaria. We were looking for a landmark building, Saint of Maria something. We looked at two imposing buildings on the right and left of the pedestrianized street where we were standing with our maps. I then realized that the building bearing the sign MAPIA was the church of Maria. 

L which I learned CYPRUS

In Cyprus I devised a way of remembering the capital letter L. I thought of it as Italic or joined up lower case L. You make an upward stroke and then come down to the line. Don't think of it as an upside down V because that will muddle you. As I kept reading the signs for Larnaka and Lemossos, each time they started what looked like my imaginary lower case l.

G like a gun

The letter G is an upright like an arm held above your head and a line to the right like pinting a gun. G for gun.

Useful Websites

Duolingo

https://www.duolingo.com

Duolingo Greek

https://www.duolingo.com/skill/el/Warm-Up

 Wikipedia

European Languages Pocket book Berlitz

Please share links to your favourite posts.

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