Teach Yourself Greek Conversation - 3 Audio CDs and a Booklet

Teach Yourself Conversational Greek

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Teach Yourself Greek Conversation - 3 Audio CDs and a Booklet

Brand New (still shrink wrapped) 3 CDs and Book

This stand-alone, all-audio course can be used by those who have little or no knowledge of the language, by those who want to learn or brush up basic conversation skills, and by more advanced learners who require extra audio material to complement their current courses.

The ten units or 'conversations' cover the situations you are most likely to find yourself in while on holiday or on business abroad. They are divided into two parts, with a dialogue in each part. The dialogue in Part 2 reuses the vocabulary and phrases from Part 1 in a slightly different context. Both parts start with an introduction to the words and phrases you'll need, followed by the dialogue. Finally it's 'Over to you': you take part in the same dialogues following the English prompts, playing all the roles in turn. So you get lots of opportunity to practise! Frequent track markers divide the CDs up into short, easy-to-use clips.

Vocabulary and phrases in the first two CDs are kept to the basics and are introduced gradually with lots of opportunity to repeat and practise, to improve your confidence in both speaking and understanding. The third CD concentrates on helping you improve your understanding, so that you will be able to hold two-way conversations with people who speak very fast or use words and phrases you do not know.

The course comes on three 75-minute CDs and has an accompanying 48-page booklet which gives the dialogues and the translations of the dialogues, for those who like to see the written word or want additional practice. The Greek is transliterated into a romanized script. The booklet also provides a basic glossary of the words and phrases used.

This is the perfect complement to 'Teach Yourself Modern Greek'.

NO NEW SCRIPT TO LEARN – booklet uses romanized transliteration LOTS OF OPPORTUNITY FOR PRACTICE AND REPETITION – improve your confidence HELP IN UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SAID BACK TO YOU - strategies for understanding what you hear, so you can have true, two-way conversations and not be thrown by the replies you get NO GRAMMAR – make progress fast, without learning boring rules or unnecessary vocabulary ALL-AUDIO COURSE – use anywhere TEN REALISTIC CONVERSATION SCENARIOS – the words and phrases you'll need

Table of Contents:

Greetings, names, introductions, nationality (English, Greek, American), words for 'yes' and 'no', jobs, Mr and Mrs, 'please' and 'thank you'. Culture: how/when Greeks greet. Gender (m/f), sing/plural, personal prons, articles, verb 'to be' introduced, positive and negative.

Describing self, job, age, family, kids, more greetings appropriate to morning, afternoon, evening etc., phrase: how are you?, first few numbers. Culture: Greek daily pattern of life. Verb 'to be'(continued), verb 'to have', masc/fem forms, personal prons (continued), positive and negative.

Finding/booking accommodation, hotel items/times of breakfast, types of room, with bath/shower etc, more numbers, times, dates, prices, money (euros), passport, culture: accommodation in Greece.

Directions, getting around, sightseeing, bus, train, taxi, metro (Athens), left and right. Culture: Greek taxis (!). Asking where something is, how long to get there, prepositions, imperatives (ie giving directions), asking interlocutor to speak more slowly/repeat, checking understanding or not.

Eating/drinking out; meals etc, common food and drink items, requesting, ordering, asking if available, likes and dislikes, hungry/thirsty
Money matters, paying for things, asking price, getting/checking change. Culture: Greek food and drink (coffees). Asking what something is like, referring to this and that.

Shopping: souvenirs, clothes, sizes, colours. Likes and dislikes (con), comparatives, superlatives.

More on money and paying, banks, credit card payments. Culture: Greek shops and shopping. Verb 'can' introduced, with its complex associated grammar touched upon.

Leisure, entertainment, sport, beach. Culture: how Greeks enjoy themselves. Asking what time things start, finish, open, close; reserving seats/tickets; modals: 'can, must, have to.

Sorting out common problems with health, sunburn, upset stomach, pharmacy, mosquito repellent etc, complaints, asking for help at pharmacy, saying what you need, don’t need, modals.

Greek has a documented history of 3,400 years, the longest of any single natural language in the Indo-European language family. It is also one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages, with fragmentary records in Mycenaean dating back to the 15th or 14th century BC, making it the world's oldest recorded living language. Today, it is spoken by approximately 17–25 million people in Greece (official), Cyprus (official), Albania, Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Italy, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Egypt, Jordan and emigrant communities around the world, including Australia, United States, Canada, Germany and elsewhere.

Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet (the oldest continuously used alphabet, and the first to introduce vowels) since the 9th century BC in Greece (before that in Linear B), and the 4th century BC in Cyprus (before that in Cypriot syllabary). Greek literature has a continuous history of nearly three thousand years.

Greek is a language distinguished by an extraordinarily rich vocabulary. In respect to the roots of words, ancient Greek vocabulary was essentially of Indo-European origin, but with a significant number of borrowings from the idioms of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks. Words of non-Indo-European origin can be traced into Greek from as early as Mycenaean times; they include a large number of Greek toponyms. The vast majority of Modern Greek vocabulary is directly inherited from ancient Greek, although in certain cases words have changed meanings. Words of foreign origin have entered the language mainly from Latin, Italian and Ottoman Turkish. During older periods of the Greek language, loan words into Greek acquired Greek inflections, leaving thus only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected.

Like most Indo-European languages, Greek is highly inflected. Greek grammar has come down through the ages fairly intact, though with some simplifications. For example, Modern Greek features two numbers: singular and plural. The dual number of Ancient times was abandoned at a very early stage. The instrumental case of Mycenaean Greek disappeared in the Archaic period, and the dative-locative of Ancient Greek disappeared in the late Hellenistic. Four cases, nominative, genitive, accusative and vocative, remain in Modern Greek. The three ancient gender noun categories (masculine, feminine and neuter) never fell out of use, while adjectives agree in gender, number, and case with their respective nouns, as do their articles. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for:

* mood — Ancient Greek: indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and optative; Modern Greek: indicative and imperative (other modal functions are expressed by periphrastic constructions)
* number — singular, plural (archaic Greek also had a dual)
* voice — Ancient Greek: active, middle, and passive; Modern Greek: active and medio-passive
* tense — Ancient Greek: present, past, future; Modern Greek: past and non-past (future is expressed by a periphrastic construction)
* person — first, second, third
* aspect — Ancient Greek: imperfective, perfective (traditionally called aorist), perfect (sometimes also called perfective, see note about terminology); Modern Greek: perfective and imperfective

Teach Yourself Greek Conversation - 3 Audio CDs and a Booklet