greek test (and moods)

It’s a very strange sensation to go from working, to sitting an exam, to normal classes, to packing up house and moving.

Last week’s Greek class: the first hour was an exam – the first assessment task for the semester, and worth 40% of the marks for the first half of the year. It wasn’t as difficult as I was fearing – by the end of it I felt that I’d passed the test – but the format, too, was different to what I was expecting.

As part of learning how to make the correct form of a Greek word, there’s a lot of memorising of whole tables of information. In this test, we were given a few tables that we had to complete from memory, in addition to the work of translating. This meant that it wasn’t just the translation skill that was being tested, but something of the breadth of vocabulary and rules, too.

The rest of the lesson was spent covering another aspect of Greek – Moods. All the words we’ve looked at so far are in the indicative mood – they describe something that is really happening. In Greek, there are other moods too: the imperative (commands), the infinitive (eg "to see"). Next time, we’re looking at the participle, and much later, the subjunctive.

By the end of it all, I’ll at least have a much stronger grasp of english grammar.