Cyclops and the Seven Priests

I've been reading lately an interesting book called Modern Greek in Asia Minor. A book written before The Great Catastrophe, and captures the dialect there before the population exchange. The second half of the book is made up of very short stories and fables. One that's rather amusing is the story of the Cyclops and the Seven Priests. This story shares some obvious similarities with the tale of Odysseus and the cyclops. Amusingly, Cyclops, a Greek word (κύκλωπης) meaning round eye (κύκλος and οφθαλμός), is rendered in Turkish, as τεπεκόζη.

Καθαρεύουσα

Κάτι βρίσκω ενδιαφέρουσα είναι ότι περισσότεροι δεν ξέρουν τίποτα από το Καθαρεύουσα. Ξέρω κάτι κατά αρχαία ελληνική γλώσσα, βεβαίως. Πρέπουν να την σπουδάζουν μερικά χρόνια. Και ξέρουν ότι ελληνικά έγραφαν με το πολυτονικό σύστημα. Αλλά, δεν ξέρουν τη λέξη 'καθαρεύουσα' ή κάτι κατά πολυτονικό σύστημα.

Αυτό είναι ένα YouTube, ότι μιλάει λίγα απ' αυτό.

Not much blog activity in the last 2 months... I have to say that blogging about learning a language is a bit challenging. Learning a language, especially one as relatively difficult as Modern Greek, and pursuing one's career and having a personal life is not easy. It demands effort everyday and whenever making a blog entry you have to ask yourself whether you should really be blogging or reviewing dialogs, reviewing your vocab or doing some misc. reading. By and large I've chosen the later, with the result that I've actually made quite a bit of progress, finishing both Pimsleur and Rosetta stone courses.

Language Course	Lessons Remaining	Total Lessons
Rosetta Stone	0	210
Greek by Radio	90	105
Pimsleur's	0	30

Night Thread

Όμορφη Θεσσαλονίκη

Στίχοι: Βασίλης Τσιτσάνης
Μουσική: Βασίλης Τσιτσάνης

Είσαι το καμάρι της καρδιάς μου
Θεσσαλονίκη όμορφη γλυκιά
κι' αν ζω στην ξελογιάστρα την Αθήνα
για σένα τραγουδώ κάθε βραδιά

Ώ! όμορφη Θεσσαλονίκη
ώ! τα μαγικά σου βράδια νοσταλγώ

- Ρεφρέν -
Μέσα στα στενά σου τα σοκάκια
έζησα τις πιο γλυκές στιγμές
καντάδες χίλιες νύχτες έχω κάνει
για όλες τις μποέμικες καρδιές

Translation of Previous Comic.

Γερός: Εσύ! Μου καινουριος εισαι; Δεν σ’εχω ξαναδει!

Φύλακες: Υα’ χάςες γερός! Τριανταπέντε χρονιά είμαι εδώ μέσα!

Φύλακες: ...Σε λίγο παιρνώ τη συνταξή μου και φεύγω!

Γερός: Αχ, τα νειάτα! δεν ησυχάζουν ποτέ!

---

Old Man: You there! You’re new aren’t you? I haven’t seen you before.

Guard: You’re losing it old man. I’ve been here 30 years.

Guard: I’m going to be retiring shortly.

Old Man: Ah, the young. Always restless.

Progress

Language Course	Lessons Remaining	Total Lessons
Rosetta Stone	35	210
Greek by Radio	104	105
Pimsleur's	29	30

Retirement

(Click image to enlarge)

Progress

Language Course	Lessons Remaining	Total Lessons
Rosetta Stone	46	210
Greek by Radio	104	105
Pimsleur's	29	30

Translation of Previous Comic.

Μεγάλος ελέφαντας: Για πεζ μου γιε μου, τι θα κάνεις όταν γινεις μέγαλος σαν κι' εμενα;
Μικριος ελεφαντάκι: Διαίτα.

Big Elephant: Tell me, my boy, what will you do when you get big like me?
Little Elephant: Diet.

Progress

Only Rosetta Stone and a bit of Pimsleur's. Apparently, Dr. Pimsleur felt the best way to learn a language was to was to teach phrases, as soon as possible, that could be used to pick-up women. A line from a Pimsleur's conversation might be: "Που θα ήθελα να πίω κάτι; Σπίτι μου;"

Language Course	Lessons Remaining	Total Lessons
Rosetta Stone	48	210
Greek by Radio	104	105
Pimsleur's	29	30

Progress

Worked a bit on Greek by Radio. A mammoth, free on-line course. Some of the audio is a bit low-fi. But mastery of all 105 course will take you quite far indeed. It can be found at: http://www.kypros.org/LearnGreek/

Language Course	Lessons Remaining	Total Lessons
Rosetta Stone	55	210
Greek by Radio	104	105

An Old Joke in any Language.

Progress

Today was pretty busy, with little time to work on Greek. However, I always try to spend a little time every day performing a few quick exercises, listening to some lessons, watching a Greek cartoon, etc. From what I've read, supported by my own experience, even five or ten minutes a day is useful as a 'maintanance dose' keeping your language skills from backsliding. In general it's alway better to do, say, 20 minutes every day rather then two or three hours on the weekend. Today all I had time for was about 15 minutes of Rosetta Stone. I plan on writing a complete review of the software when I've finished the course, but one of the strengths of the Rosetta Stone software system is that it's quite easy, and even fun, to jump in and spend a few minutes working on lessons.

Language Course	Lessons Remaining	Total Lessons
Rosetta Stone	55	210

"Why Modern Greek?" This is a question that I've been asked before about my, if I can flatter myself, Quixotic endeavor. When I was in high school, I tried to teach myself Classical Greek, but failed. In trying to figure out why I failed, I arrived at the conclusion, probably in further retrospect incorrect - the root problem was lack of diligence, that my failure was due to me being a very aural person. And, so I figured, since I couldn't hear the language I was handicapped in learning it.

I decided to start studying Modern Greek as a means of quickly learning the language and then assuming that it would be easy to learn the classical language once the modern had been mastered. This logic was flawed in both its premises Modern Greek is not an easy language to learn -- though perhaps easier in morphology to classical Greek, and learning the classical language, once the modern one is learned plus the difficulties of learning the modern language itself is probably greater than learning the classical language directly. Roughly:

While,
[Modern Greek] < [Classical].
Unfortunately,
[Modern Greek] + [Modern to Classical] > [Classical Alone]

So, if I'm not learning Modern Greek as a means of learning the classical language then why? Firstly, it IS a means of learning Ancient Greek, just not the most efficient. I still plan on learning both. But Modern Greek is a wonderful language, with a wonderful urban folk music, ρεμπέτικο, many world class, Nobel prize winning poets and is the native language of one of my favorite authors, Kazantzakis (Καζαντζάκης).

I'm Back!

Well, it's been a while since I last posted, I think it's fair to say. Perhaps I should just start a new blog? But, this is similar to my approach to Greek -- I put it away for a while, sometimes a long while, and then come back to it -- and I think that it's fitting that I keep plugging away at this one.

So, my progress in Greek has actually carried forward more than my posting history would indicate. My focus right now has been to improve my listening comprehension. I'm finishing the two level Rosetta Stone course and starting Pimsleur 1 (all there is unfortunately) and Greek by Radio. A Mammoth free online course with over 100 audio lessons, with text. Currently my reading material consists of the Little Prince (Ο Μικρος Πριγκιπας) and Plato's Apology (Απολογία), in Modern Greek, not the classical.

Harry brings all his stuff home and then has to carry it all back to the station.

Covered lots of ground today. My prediction has been true so far. Once out of Diagon Alley, the vocabulary became much easier.

Current Page in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone	107
Number of pages read	7
Total Vocab (jMemorize)	342
Vocab Learned Since Last Blog	38

Harry's back home but not for long. After getting home, (and how did he carry all his stuff to his house, from the station? I get a sore arm just carrying groceries home.) and spending a few months lying on his bed reading school work with an owl flying over head, it's time to pack everything up, clear his throat, ξερόβηξε, and ask his Uncle to take him to the station.

Have to admit that the last couple of pages are effective and are one of the reasons I like Harry Potter. When Harry says good-bye to Hagrid and returns to the land of the Muggles, one can feel the ache of returning to the mundane from the world of fantasy.

The sense of wonder and amazement is the pay-off of fantasy and science fiction literature and when a book is firing on all cylinders you feel it in full force. In the next chapter Harry meets Ron and throws money around like real estate agents at a Las Vegas strip club.

Harry buys a bunch of stuff with weird names

Changed the site name to nicophon.blogspot.com. (sorry for the inconvenience)

Progress for the last week has been OK, though over half of my progress was made this weekend.

Current Page	100
Number of pages read	18
Total Vocab (jMemorize)	304
Vocab Learned Since Last Blog	200

Harry's at Diagon Alley. O.M.G. What a vocabulary nightmare. I thought that perhaps most of the specialized magical vocabulary might be borrowed from the English. But that certainly wasn't the case. Not only where there a lot of words that I didn't know, but many of the words were rare and specialized words that I couldn't find in my Greek-English dictionary or the various online resources that I had some seem to be words from Greek folk literature. The result being that it took me a ton of time to look up many of the words which I might very well never run into again, outside of Harry Potter.

Still the story is great fun and my progress has been constant. In a few short pages Harry will have his magic wand and he'll be off to platform 9 and 3/4 (πλακφόρμα 9 και 3/4). After that I'm hoping that I'll start seeing some real progress.

Current Page	82
Number of pages read	7
Total Vocab(jMemorize)	137
Vocab Learned today	50

Harry's on his way to Diagon Alley! I had an embarrassing moment tonight were I was relating my progress and I called it Diagonal Alley. Lordy. I was as though I had pronounced every word in Hors d'Oeuvres with a heavy southern drawl. For those that are interested the Greek is: Διαγώνιος Αλέα.

Current progress: I read about 6 pages today; I'm at page 76. I had about 70 unknown words. That's quite a lot. Almost all of my Greek study time goes into learning unknown words at this point. I could push onwards, rather than learning every questionable word, as I am able to get the gist. But my goal is to totally master the Rowling's vocabulary so that I can begin increasing my reading rate. Currently, I read at about 26 words a minute (not counting word look-ups which I only do once I have finished a section). I would like to get that to 100 by the end of the Philosopher's Stone.

My favorite line of the last couple of pages is the one that Harry says to himself after waking up the next day after having met Hagrid, the half giant and keeper of the keys (κλειδοκράτορας). He thinks that the the whole thing was just a dream,

“Και να η θεία Πετούνια, που μου χτυπά την πόρτα για να ξυπνήσω.” (Note, in Greek the punctuation seems to always go outside the quotation marks.)

Translated: “And now Aunt Petunia is knocking at my door to wake me up.”

Of course it wasn't a dream and it's not Aunt Petunia'; it's an owl knocking at the window to deliver the morning newspaper.