Customer Reviews

201 Modern Greek Verbs (201 Verbs)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book is pretty bad. The conjugations are badly labeled. The type is hard to read because it was written on a bad typewriter ages ago. Get "600 Modern Greek Verbs" by Carmen Capri-Karka instead. It has a better way of labeling the conjugations, it was published in 1997, and it's well organized.

Greek is a difficult language for foreigners to read. So of course they chose a typeface that is so florid it would be difficult even for a Greek to read. Then they decided to make things even harder by making it the tiniest point size available, so that you need a magnifying glass to read it. Not satisfied with that they printed it on the cheapest possible paper so that all the letters run into one another, so even with a magnifying glass, it's hard to work out what the letters are.

What's more they have included all the breath marks which are no longer in use in modern Greek.

To top it all, a number of common verbs (e.g. To Start) are not even in the book.

I've just taken delivery of "600 Greek Verbs" which is MUCH better

This book is ok as a guide to familiarise yourself with the conjugation patterns. However, it is 20 years out of date and carries out dated accents/breathings on the Greek text. It could also have been laid out better and used a better font. I would recommend using this book alongside a good grammar reference guide.

I returned this book in favor of 600 Modern Greek Verbs, which I highly recommend. This book uses a hard-to-read font and is poorly printed, so it is very difficult to use.

I'm learning modern Greek and thus I needed a conjugation book to help me. This one is not the best. There is not a good verb conjugation book out there - yet. (If only 501 verbs would publish one!) In the 70s or 80s, the Greek language was modified. Before, there were many accents and Greek was more complicated. Now, there is typically only one accent per word, but this book isn't new enough to reflect that major change in the Greek language. For example, "ăgapó" - to love (i love), is written like that with two accent. In the new standard Greek, it's just 'Agapó". This is a good reference though, it does have complete conjugations, but not enough verbs. Also, sometimes the print is hard to read. But, if you want a reference source for Greek verbs, this is the best I've found.

This book is nearly impossible to use! Even my greek teacher says so. Sure, it has 100 conjugations for each verb but there is NO english that explains them!!!! It lists the word, then the definition and then 100 conjugations and doesn't tell you what each conjugation means.

If you speak greek, I could see using this book. If you a re learning it as a second language like me, find something else. Unless you want to buy mine!

Ìé÷áëéò

A great disappointment; it's just not good enough to list only 200 verbs. Frustratingly, there were so many commonly-found verbs missing from this book that I'm wondering whether the publishers simply edited out half the book in order to keep costs down. The number of entries would need to be tripled to adequately cover the commonest verbs used in modern Greek.

The book is very useful to students of modern Greek. However, I found two deficiencies that I found annoying: first, the names of the verb tenses were difficult to understand since they did not correspond to previous names of tenses that I have learned in Greek and other languages; second, some very common verbs (e.g., "come" and "pay")were not included, when some very obscure verbs were.

« 201 Greek Modern Verbs », a prettily designed outside cover which somehow deceives readers into thinking that the book inside is of the same stuff, is conspicuous by its missing parts, notwithstanding the historical state of total lack of standartization in the Greek language.

1) Believe it or not, the book does not present the Greek alphabet, which may make some naive reader think that he/she is stupid not understanding a so simple thing as words written in......Greek ! No, my friend. You are not schmuck; in fact, to read in Greek is not among the simplest things in life. So, how could anyone know that letters in Greek, for instance `Y' (gamma) , are not what they seem to be, standing for our roman `G' and being the third letter in the alphabetical sequence ?; or , that the letter `P' is not what we think it to be, standing in Greek for `R' in English (which uses the roman alphabet, which derived from the Greek a long time ago) ; and so on.

2) The fonts or types used are difficult to differentiate and understand in what seems to be an inordinate jungle of confusing letters, grouped in the worst possible visible way. If this is modern Greek, think about ancient Greek, with all its diacritic accentuations !!

3) A great opportunity was missed by the author in not making the Greek language more pleasant to the reader. For instance, why did he not made the marvelous associations between the verbs « Fantazomai » (roman letters) and « Pona » (also roman) with the modern Western words « phantom » and « penalty » ? Also, why not quote (ok, I know the difference between modern and ancient greek) ancient Greek philosophers or author from the enormous pool of early classicism ?

To sum it up, this book was a sheer disapointment to me and it is a contradiction in its own terms that , being not for the non professional, is also unesuful to any Greek scholar.

While it is true that it would be preferable to have this type of book written in demotic Greek, this book is certainly acceptable and very helpful for the person who needs to know how to conjugate verbs in Modern Greek.