When pursuing self study of any language, one of the most important tasks it to find suitable material for study, the biggest criteria being quantity of audio available. (I.e hours of talking.) For being one of the lesser European languages, Greek has a large number of resources available. For instance both Pimsleur series levels I and II and Rosetta Stone I and II are in print, the intermediate and advanced levels of those products are generally reserved for languages like German, French, Spanish and Chinese, and even then coverage is not uniform. Both Hindi, with several hundred million speakers, is only offered through level one proficiency in those courses.
Modern Greek is also well represented in the free online world: there is the colossal FSI course which will teach you an elevated, bureaucratic version of the Demotiki dialect, but also a module teaching the Katherevousa; there is also a podcast put out by the Hellenic American Union that will familiarize you with everyday conversation (Though it does expect you to have some initial provenience in the language when you start.) and there are several other high quality resources as well. But best resource free, or otherwise, is the on-line Greek by Radio Series made available by Kypros-Net at:
http://www.kypros.org/LearnGreek/
This is an amazing resource, impressive for any language, a real treasure for Greek learners. It consists of 105 audio courses, along with transcripts, notes, tables and vocab for each lesson. The course is carefully paced such you need know nothing about Greek when it starts and by end of of it will have master all thee major grammatical points of the Greek language, have been exposed to many everyday conversational settings, learned a vocabulary of over 1000 words and most likely grown very fond of your presenters, Ellie, Andreas and Nico. Unfortunately, there is one draw back to the course. The audio quality is barely acceptable, and the RealPlayer streaming format making it impossible to save or access via mobile devices, like the iPhone.
That, however, hopefully is being remedied. High quality versions of the audio for courses is being posted on YouTube making it much easy for the beginner to develop their pronunciation and making it making it possible to access the content using the latest generation of mobile devices. (Though not quite as convenient as a pod cast. Hopefully someone will endeavor to set one up)
As new audio is posted, I'll update this post to provide links here so that you will have one place to access all the audio files.
Lesson 1 - Part 1/2
Lesson 1 - Part 2/2:
Lesson 2 - Part 1/2:
Lesson 2 - Part 2/2:
Lesson 3 - Part 1/2
Lesson 3 - Part 2/2
Lesson 4 - Part 1/2
Lesson 4 - Part 2/2
Lesson 5 - Part 1/2
Lesson 5 - Part 2/2
