Customer Reviews

Conversational Modern Greek in 20 Lessons

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

 

 

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.

Since I learned italian with another book from the same collection, I expected the same to happen with this book. Yet I found this one a lot less helpful. It contains too much information in one page and what's more, it is not really organized in a progressive way so you need a lot of time to pass from unit to the next one while you can grasp everything. When I switched from this book to the "Conversational Greek in 7 days" by Hara Garoufalia, I found a lot of differences in the vocabulary and the structures I had learned from the Cortina's book. So, I had to refer to other books and dictionaries to see which one was right, and I found out what the other readers say: that the first one I was using was outdated and things are not said like that anymore. Of course, some of the things I learned with this book were useful, yet I had to change some of them.

If you are looking for something easy to use, yet really helpful and reliable I strongly recommend you to buy Hara Garoufalia's book instead of this one!

This was the first book I bought to help me learn Greek. I was very frustrated with it from the start, and bought other books to use instead. My husband speaks Greek fluently, so between him and the other books I bought I started to get a good understanding for the basics. I decided to give this book another try, and found it easier to use the second time around, but only because I was already able to speak and read a little Greek. The main problem with the book is that it uses vocabulary from the 1950, and since in the late 70's early '80's the Greek goverment decided to stop using all but one accent the words you learn from this book and the words you would actually see in Greece do not look the same. It is also entirely too formal. I would tell my husband a new sentence I learned from the book, and he would always say that, while technically correct, no one would actually speak that way. I noticed this problem alot while in Greece this year. I could not understand questions that I had learned because people don't say them the same way over there as it is printed in the book.

I have owned this book for almost twenty years. I have used it repeatedly in that duration in conjunction with other materials, some even more outdated than this. I think it's a good book, but it's clearly a relic from a bygone era. If you're doing research on mid-20th century Greece, it is handy to have a bit of experience deciphering period text. If you are under fifty and try speak to people like this, they will look at you as though you're from another planet. If you want to learn to speak Greek, my recommendation would be the 'Epikoinoniste Ellinika' series, or 'Mathemata Ellinikon'. Language pedagogy has evolved a bit since this volume was published.

This book is better suited to review or conversational practice. The lessons don't include any grammatical explanations. You're pretty much left to figure it out for yourself using the minimal footnotes, and comparing the words with the inflexion charts in the reference grammar in the back. I used this book in my first (unsuccessful) attempt to learn Modern Greek.

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.

I got this book after reading a basic, introductory book and I think that this one fills that role quite well. It doesn't make a great first book but is an excellent second one. The early chapters explain issues such as pronunciation. Then there are twenty chapters that have around two pages of vocabulary and a series of sentences with a pronunciation guide and translations. Thus through these sentences one can improve one's vocabulary and reading skills. At the end of the book are chapters on grammar and a dictionary. I like the format and this is a good stepping stone to reading books and articles.

The book is of some help, like any other language book where the author tries to imitate the sound of the language. The back page of the book advertises a "Free CD or Cassette in Greek to the buyer of this language book".
A CD accompanying a language course is very useful as you can imitate the speakers pronunciation, which is difficult doing it by reading a close resemblance from a book.
When you receive the book you will realise that this offer is only for US and Canada bringing a flimsy excuse in small print "due to foreign customs regulations"
I wrote to the publishers explaining that in my country there are no customs restrictions of educational material and if they could send me my a free CD.
Todate the publisher did not have the decency to reply to my request.

Very helpfull book for students learning Greek. Contains Modern Greek language sentences and pronounciations.