Dom Pannell's Blog

It's all Greek to me

So I felt like a new challenge for 2007 and I thought I'd give learning Greek a shot.

I was speaking to Andrée at the wedding of some mutual friends last year and she mentioned that she'd had remarkable success using the Pimsleur language learning system. In fact, she told me that she reached a level of some fluency in Persian after just one month.

Now Andrée being one of the few people whose views I take seriously when it comes to learning languages (she speaks Japanese fluently as well as Farsi) I thought it probably worthwhile trying out this Pimsleur malarkey.

I set up an alert on eBay and have managed to hunt down CD sets for Arabic, Hebrew and Thai as well as Greek (when I say I'm trying out a language learning methodology, I don't mess about).

My goal was to study a language from a culture I find fascinating and that is not Germanic or Romance in origin - I speak French and Swedish fluently, used to speak Spanish very well (my first degree is in French and Spanish) and at one point my Italian was almost respectable. I also once managed to learn sufficient Danish to get round bars, restaurants and taxis without reverting to English.

All of the CD sets that I bought fit the bill: I have a friend in Thailand who I'd quite like to visit; I've always wanted to learn Arabic and Hebrew (due to an interest in the Middle East and bafflement at the political/military situation in that part of the world), but Greek won the day because my fine friend Sven has been busy over the past couple of years buying property on two Greek islands and he's invited me to go down there and stay.

Having an underlying motivation for learning a new language is crucial because it takes perseverance. While I find figuring out grammar systems quite stimulating (at least to the modest level that I want to take it), learning vocabulary is tough. I have quite a good technique for learning vocab, or set of techniques, which I may describe on this blog at some point, but even so it is hard work and requires dedication.

I will write up a fairly detailed review of Pimsleur's Greek course when I get further into it. For the moment I'll just say that I've just finished lesson eight out of thirty and I'm quite comfortable asking someone if they want to eat or drink something and telling them that I want to go to a restaurant on Victory Street!

I do hope I take to Pimsleur, mainly because I want to learn Arabic and Hebrew too!!

Posted by dompannell at January 28, 2007 9:11 PM | TrackBack