This course is designed to introduce students to the fundaments of Modern Greek. It is suitable both for complete beginners and also as a continuation course for students who have completed the intensive “A Taste of Modern Greek”. It will teach the alphabet and pronunciation system in its entirety, elementary grammar and the everyday vocabulary of Modern Greek. Students will learn to read and write in Greek and will develop basic conversational capacity. This course also provides an accessible introduction to the fundaments of Greek grammar with a holistic, integrated approach: it situates complicated grammar within an engaging, culturally authentic context via colloquial textual and audio-visual materials. Grammatical concepts will be activated directly in short reading, writing, listening and speaking exercises. Compromising neither the grammatical nor colloquial realities of the language, by its conclusion the course will have positioned students to pursue Greek either in its more rigorous, literary register or in its casual, conversational register.

DELIVERY MODE

• Face-to-Face

TEXTBOOK

• Tutor supplied material

COURSE OUTLINE

• Introducing oneself & exchanging biographical information; Formal & informal greetings; Numbers 0-20
• Names of countries, nationalities, languages; Basic objects/attributes of work, school & the home
• The Greek alphabet, writing, sounds, pronunciation; Grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter)
• Forming adjectival phrases (gender agreement); The definite articles (singular & plural)
• Introduction to “case” declensions for nouns & adjectives (nominative & accusative only)
• Forming “to be” sentences; Simple present tense verb conjugation (verbs “to be”, “to have” “to do”, “to work”, “to study”)

LEARNING OUTCOMES

By the end of this course, students should be able to:

1. Learn to read, write and pronounce all consonants, vowels, letter combinations and accent marks of the Modern Greek alphabet
2. Learn to greet others, introduce oneself and ask others for personal information
3. Learn to construct simple adjectival phrases, “to be” sentences & other basic verbal sentences