Greek in 10 years

There’s a guy who writes a column in the Athens News called ‘Greek in 35 years’. Only twenty-five years to go then.... 

I’ve been in Greece for nearly ten years now. My wife is Greek and now I have two young children here.  So why can’t I still speak the !@#$%^* language!?

In retrospect I was overconfident at the outset.  Plenty of English footballers move abroad and pick up the local lingo, I reasoned, and they struggle to string coherent sentences together in English, never mind in a foreign language (a certain Mr Beckham springs to mind).  So how hard can it be?  In fact I went further than this: I’m bright and hard-working, I thought - who needs lessons?  I’ll teach myself.  So I went to the local library and picked up a book called ‘Greek in Three Weeks’.  Three weeks later I took it back and exchanged it for one called ‘Greek in Three Months’, because I wanted to do more than order kalamari in a taverna.

Studying was quite enjoyable to begin with; I enjoyed writing the elegantly curvaceous Greek characters and there is a pleasurable thrill of recognition when you realise that Arachne means spider and Phobos means fear: Of course, you think - arachnophobia.  Nevertheless, there were early hints of the language’s Dark Side:  So the P is an R and the W an O?  OK, I can handle that.  Three genders?  Alright, that’s only one more than my ‘O’ level French.  Hang on though, what’s all this ‘O, τον, του...’?  At the end of my three months I switched to a linguaphone course. This wasn’t perfect:  The scene ‘Στο περιπτερο’ (at the periptero) had somebody buying a packet of Karelia filters for 20 drachmas – was this book seriously out of date or had I been shopping at the wrong periptero?  However it was admirably thorough and had an intriguing subplot: Would main character Maria Kazakou’s best friend ever cop off with Maria’s little brother Andreas?  Sadly, it was not to be, although I suspect that if more language courses had soap-opera storylines like this one more people might make it to the end of them.

The net result of these endeavors was that I had an (admittedly shaky) grasp of the different endings of nouns and adjectives, and could at least recognise a passive verb if it twisted itself round my head and beat me repeatedly with a cricket bat.  But could I translate this knowledge into practical usage?  I got by in limited situations, such as ordering food, going to the post office and explaining to taxi drivers what I was doing in Greece (when I explained that my wife was Greek, one memorably replied «Α! Το *$#%& τραβει το βαπορι!», which, if you think about it, is a saying that probably goes back to Helen of Troy).  When it came to social conversations, however, I was hopeless: A typical night would begin with me making a token effort, and quickly descend into a vicious circle (διαλληλος κυκλος) whereby the less I understood, the more beer I drank, and the more I drank, the less I understood.  However I thought I’d probably reached the limit of what I could learn from books, and practical experience was what was required.  I’d gradually pick up the language just by living here, as if by osmosis.

The problem is that if you speak English, its actually very easy to avoid speaking Greek in Rhodes.  If I was Chinese, I’d probably have been fluent years ago.  But I work via the internet with English people.  My social life gravitated towards English people, or at least Greeks who speak English. There’s always some television on in English, even if its just CNN (and besides you can always get films from the video shop or DVDs from Amazon).  Even the in-laws speak English.  The exception to this is the elderly yiayia downstairs (in traditional Greek style, we live above my wife’s parents, who live above the yiayia. And yes, I had a big, fat Greek wedding).  In some ways, talking to yiayia is good Greek conversation practice:  Her forgetfulness means she repeats the same stories over and over again, and I think after hearing them twenty times I’ve finally understood the one about how she saw the king of Italy in 1932, and the other one about how she hid some gold sovereigns for a British spy during the war.  On the other hand, her speech is peppered with bits of Italian from back in the day, and most of the time I just sit there saying «Ναι, ναι», and nodding my head sympathetically and smiling and hoping that I’m doing these in the right places and not, say, emitting a wry chuckle when she’s telling me about how her husband passed away.

So a few weeks ago, I finally admitted defeat and bit the bullet and signed up for Greek lessons with a motley collection of Italians, Germans, Swedes, Bulgarians, Russians, Portuguese, Poles, Moldavians and a Chinese lad.  I was surprised at how much I’d forgotten.  After the preliminaries (“You already know lots of Greek, because many words in your language come from Greek” – I suspect this may have surprised the Chinese guy) it was a case of here we go again: «Ο, τον, του, οι, τους, των...».  The most common question is:  “Is there a rule for this?”. The answer is generally: “No, you just have learn it.”. “But why is it like that?”, we ask.  “Because of Ancient Greek.” she says.  Personally I think Homer’s got a lot to answer for.

So is it me? Perhaps its just that Greek is fundamentally hard, harder than Heracles, Achilles and Leonidas rolled into one and armed to the teeth with modern assault weapons. At times it seems to be trying its best to make language a complete impediment to understanding. After all, what other language has six different ways of making a basic ‘ee’ sound, has virtually the same word for medicine and poison (φαρμακο and φαρμακι - perhaps this was a Darwinian mechanism for weeding poor spellers out of the gene pool), and accents that happily bounce up and down words like a kid full of caffeine on a space hopper?  As an English speaker, what is it with genders anyway? Why is your elbow male and your knee female – are elbows somehow more macho than knees?  Rules here (“Words ending in –ος are masculine...”) are slippery and have a habit of turning into guidelines (“... apart from all these exceptions”) in much the same way as a Greek friend thinks that traffic light laws are only there for ‘guidance’.  And what about pronunciation?  My personal bugbear is the Greek for yoghurt, γιαουρτι – a word which must have been out taking a whizz went the consonants were being handed out. 

But whether the language is dumb or I am (and as I watch the other students slowly but surely catch me up and overtake me, I’m beginning to suspect its the latter), I have to keep trying unless I want my kids to have a ready-made way of plotting against me behind my back.  And maybe in twenty-five years there’ll be a vacancy going at the Athens News...


Jonathan Leach