day two of greek

After a number of hours spent revising verb conjugations and noun declensions (the noun was asked if it would conjugate, but it declined) on my paltry vocab, it seems like most of our initial vocabulary is starting to settle.

I’m getting better at reading and writing greek characters. Today’s real challenge is to notice the word endings, and use them to work out the role of that particular word in a sentence. For someone who has never studied grammar in any great depth, this has been one of the steeper learning curves.

For example. In English, the sentence “the dog chased the cat” is different to the sentence “the cat chased the dog”. How can you tell? The word order is different. In Greek, word order doesn’t matter, but rather it’s the suffixes that tell you who is chasing whom. So far, there are six different verb suffixes we need to know (one each for 1st, 2nd and 3rd person singular and for plural), and there are some extra rules there depending on the last letter of the base word.

Confused? Sorry: consider yourself lucky that you’re not in Kel’s shoes, trying to work out whether I’ve answered something right or not by looking things up in the back of the textbook. I think Kel will be much better at Greek than she’s ever wanted to be, and that by the end of this week!

I still need to try harder to speak to some of the new people at college: it’s much easier to fall back to just getting keys to the library and grabbing textbooks for later subjects, but (as I mentioned yesterday) I think there’s more to college than just the classes, assignments, and course content.

Most surreal moment so far? Listening to the audio CD that comes with the (Cambridge press) Greek textbook, hearing a British accent introduce the CD, and then hearing all the words (Greek, and their English meanings) read out by someone with an American accent.

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