While bored in high school math class around the year 2005, I forced myself to learn the Greek alphabet. That very much came in handy in university, as Greek letters are frequently used for variables in computer science, mathematics, and physics.
Very handy. My math education would have gone much better if my notes weren't full of "lambda is the half stickman; sigma is upside down Q or broken E" and other really silly things
Yeah, they should mark the Greek alphabet as a mandatory prerequisite for college math. It had an unreasonable effect on how quickly I was processing notation-heavy math after learning some Greek for going on a trip over there.
Why would modern Greek be "irrelevant"? Millions of Greeks and Cypriots speak the language, along with minorities in other countries and a very large and well dispersed diaspora. Greece and Cyprus are major holiday destinations for northern Europeans. There are major writers such as Nikos Kazantzakis who have used modern Greek so there are cultural reasons to. Heck, I even like some modern Greek music, and am grateful for it, since it was one of the few things which kept me happy during lockdown.
You're right in saying Classical (inc. Koine) Greek is far more influential, but modern Greek is not "frankly irrelevant".
Everything written in ancient Greek that is foundational to western literature, has already been translated, likely to a higher standard than most of the people trying to learn it.
Unless you wish to be part of an effort to further improve the quality of these translations, including to adjust them for the fact modern languages themselves are a moving target, just read those translations.
Modern Greek, on the other hand, is a living language with new art and culture coming from it. I may not be able to write "a cup of tea please" without misspelling tea, nor pronouncing it so badly they reply in English (as per my user profile), but this is infinitely more valuable than knowing if the ancient Greek character inviting people over for a meal is saying the people will eat the meal or be the meal.
What you call "classical pronunciation" is really at best an approximation of the ancient Greek pronunciation, but mixed heavily with English (after some frolicking around in Latin). As far as I know, this is limited to English speakers only.
For example, π is pronounced "πι", or probably closed to "pee" in modern and in ancient Greek. It's never pronounced like "pie". Same with all letters that end with "i", for example "φ,χ,ψ" (pronounced as phee, chee, psee, never rhyming with pie). T (τ) was never pronounced as "ta-oo", either, not in ancient nor modern Greek.
There are differences between modern and ancient Greek of course. For example "β" (beta), originally pronounced more like it's now in English, only with a longer "e", while in modern Greek it's more like "vita")
As native speakers of a language that uses Cyrillic, it was a little easier for my peers and me to learn Greek letters for the math classes, since most of them come for free to people who know both Latin and Cyrillic.
But when the probability theory class started, everyone found themselves in one of two groups: those who could reliably draw "ξ", or those who instead drew some random snaky thing which probably does not even have a proper Unicode representation. I spent half an hour finally memorizing how the damn thing is actually written to move myself from the latter group to the former.
Get a decent Greek grammar book and go through the first couple chapters, even if you don’t plan to complete the book. After completing the exercises you’ll be amazed by how quickly the Greek alphabet stuck. Repeat every 10 years if necessary.
As Portuguese that was of great help, given the amount of words with Greek roots, understanding the alphabet automatically made me available several words that I already knew.
The problem is that the ancient and modern Greek alphabets are slightly different. The ancient pronunciations map more easily on to our alphabet. I find the modern ones less intuitive e.g. beta being a V sound. There is an example below, where someone writes Bravo in modern Greek, and uses "mu beta" for the "b" sound and "beta" for the "v" sound.
B/V shifts or mergers are very common, notably in many Spanish variants they will, for example, write “vaca”, betraying the latin root “vacca”, but very clearly say “baca”. Coming from a language that clearly differentates between these sounds, it’s surprising how close they are.
Fascinating! I assume Mandarin is one of the other two languages your kids are learning, in which case you may be interested or have already seen Chineasy app and book, for a similar experience with Hanzi.
Nothing special, probably not even the hardest out there to learn. But that's still requiring some effort, just like learning any alphabet actually. Greek somehow kept prestigious place in academia, so it's just more likely going to show that friction in the face of those who are there to learn completely unrelated matter for which using different alphabet is superfluous.
That just reminded me I have a teach yourself devanagari by practicing book waiting for me.
… which heavily involves memorizing foreign letters. English and German mostly share the same alphabet, though, which suggests that the person asking the question hasn’t quite grasped the point. That’s what I was trying to get at in my comment.
The author is a Greek-speaking parent teaching his Greek-speaking children to read by visually pairing each letter with a Greek word that starts with that letter.
If you tried to teach English-speaking children with words that start with that letter in German, you'd probably confuse them quite a bit.
During undergrad years, IFC fraternity pledges had to memorize the Greek alphabet for obvious reasons. This is how the capital letters were taught amongst bros.
Just did and still not seeing exactly what OP has made where the object looks like the letter. There are a few where the letters are abused to vaguely look like (use same texture) objects.
Maybe my Google foo sucks but could someone actually link what they're seeing?
ομφαλός (belly button) is quite weird for ο (omikron), but I can't think of something better!
Just listing the letters below and my rating for each letter, maybe someone has a better idea for some of them:
α - αχλάδι (pear) 5/5
β - βάρκα (boat) 5/5
γ - γίδα (goat) 4/5
δ - δεινόσαυρος (dinosaur) 4/5
ε - έντομο (insect, bug) 4/5
ζ - ζώνη (belt) 3/5
η - ηλιοτρόπιο (sunflower) 3/5
θ - θρόνος (throne) 4/5
ι - ιππόκαμπος (seahorse) 3/5
κ - κάκτος (cactus) 2/5
λ - λιοντάρι (lion) 4/5
μ - μάσκα (mask) 4/5
ν - νυχτερίδα (bat) 4/5
ξ - ξύλο (wood, stick of wood) 2/5
ο - ομφαλός (belly button) 1/5
π - πόρτα (door) 4/5
ρ - ρακέτα (racket) 4/5
σ - σαλιγκάρι (snail) 5/5
τ - τραπέζι (table) 5/5
υ - υποβρύχιο (submarine) 4/5
φ - φίδι (snake) 5/5
χ - χιόνι (snow) 2/5
ψ - ψάρεμα (fishing) 3/5
ω - ωκεανός (ocean) 5/5
I'm basing my rating on how common a word is, and how much the shape resembles the drawing and vice versa.
While bored in high school math class around the year 2005, I forced myself to learn the Greek alphabet. That very much came in handy in university, as Greek letters are frequently used for variables in computer science, mathematics, and physics.
Very handy. My math education would have gone much better if my notes weren't full of "lambda is the half stickman; sigma is upside down Q or broken E" and other really silly things
Yeah, they should mark the Greek alphabet as a mandatory prerequisite for college math. It had an unreasonable effect on how quickly I was processing notation-heavy math after learning some Greek for going on a trip over there.
As I say above, the issue is that modern Greek pronounces some letters very differently. We use the classical pronunciation in maths etc.
Modern Greek is, frankly, irrelevant.
Ancient Greek is needed to get a full Western education, for reading some of our foundational literature properly.
Why would modern Greek be "irrelevant"? Millions of Greeks and Cypriots speak the language, along with minorities in other countries and a very large and well dispersed diaspora. Greece and Cyprus are major holiday destinations for northern Europeans. There are major writers such as Nikos Kazantzakis who have used modern Greek so there are cultural reasons to. Heck, I even like some modern Greek music, and am grateful for it, since it was one of the few things which kept me happy during lockdown.
You're right in saying Classical (inc. Koine) Greek is far more influential, but modern Greek is not "frankly irrelevant".
Everything written in ancient Greek that is foundational to western literature, has already been translated, likely to a higher standard than most of the people trying to learn it.
Unless you wish to be part of an effort to further improve the quality of these translations, including to adjust them for the fact modern languages themselves are a moving target, just read those translations.
Modern Greek, on the other hand, is a living language with new art and culture coming from it. I may not be able to write "a cup of tea please" without misspelling tea, nor pronouncing it so badly they reply in English (as per my user profile), but this is infinitely more valuable than knowing if the ancient Greek character inviting people over for a meal is saying the people will eat the meal or be the meal.
What you call "classical pronunciation" is really at best an approximation of the ancient Greek pronunciation, but mixed heavily with English (after some frolicking around in Latin). As far as I know, this is limited to English speakers only.
For example, π is pronounced "πι", or probably closed to "pee" in modern and in ancient Greek. It's never pronounced like "pie". Same with all letters that end with "i", for example "φ,χ,ψ" (pronounced as phee, chee, psee, never rhyming with pie). T (τ) was never pronounced as "ta-oo", either, not in ancient nor modern Greek.
There are differences between modern and ancient Greek of course. For example "β" (beta), originally pronounced more like it's now in English, only with a longer "e", while in modern Greek it's more like "vita")
As native speakers of a language that uses Cyrillic, it was a little easier for my peers and me to learn Greek letters for the math classes, since most of them come for free to people who know both Latin and Cyrillic.
But when the probability theory class started, everyone found themselves in one of two groups: those who could reliably draw "ξ", or those who instead drew some random snaky thing which probably does not even have a proper Unicode representation. I spent half an hour finally memorizing how the damn thing is actually written to move myself from the latter group to the former.
Μπράβο ρε. Πόσο όμορφο
Get a decent Greek grammar book and go through the first couple chapters, even if you don’t plan to complete the book. After completing the exercises you’ll be amazed by how quickly the Greek alphabet stuck. Repeat every 10 years if necessary.
As Portuguese that was of great help, given the amount of words with Greek roots, understanding the alphabet automatically made me available several words that I already knew.
Naturally had to skill up on everything else.
The problem is that the ancient and modern Greek alphabets are slightly different. The ancient pronunciations map more easily on to our alphabet. I find the modern ones less intuitive e.g. beta being a V sound. There is an example below, where someone writes Bravo in modern Greek, and uses "mu beta" for the "b" sound and "beta" for the "v" sound.
For ancient Greek, two great books are:
Greek: an Intensive Course by Hansen and Quinn.
Basics of Biblical Greek by William Mounce
Both are standard texts with solutions easily available online.
B/V shifts or mergers are very common, notably in many Spanish variants they will, for example, write “vaca”, betraying the latin root “vacca”, but very clearly say “baca”. Coming from a language that clearly differentates between these sounds, it’s surprising how close they are.
Fascinating! I assume Mandarin is one of the other two languages your kids are learning, in which case you may be interested or have already seen Chineasy app and book, for a similar experience with Hanzi.
I wish cards like these didn't stop at ONE letter
a lot of reading skill is in connecting one letter to the next, syllable-grouped
teaching should incorporate that
Very cool. With English there is Letterland which seems quite similar at a glance.
https://letterland.com/
I read this whole article like you were going to teach them Ancient Greek, but now I'm guessing modern is more likely?
Anyway, some of my strongest language class memories from college are from translating parts of the Odyssey and New Testament.
Yeah these cards have modern Greek words on them.
I never understood what was supposed to be so hard about Greek letters.
Nothing special, probably not even the hardest out there to learn. But that's still requiring some effort, just like learning any alphabet actually. Greek somehow kept prestigious place in academia, so it's just more likely going to show that friction in the face of those who are there to learn completely unrelated matter for which using different alphabet is superfluous.
That just reminded me I have a teach yourself devanagari by practicing book waiting for me.
no download or buy link?
I have similar projects in mind. How were these printed?
Are there good sets out there for other languages: English, German, etc?
This is about memorizing foreign letters.
No it's not. It's about teaching letter forms to kids.
… which heavily involves memorizing foreign letters. English and German mostly share the same alphabet, though, which suggests that the person asking the question hasn’t quite grasped the point. That’s what I was trying to get at in my comment.
The author is a Greek-speaking parent teaching his Greek-speaking children to read by visually pairing each letter with a Greek word that starts with that letter.
If you tried to teach English-speaking children with words that start with that letter in German, you'd probably confuse them quite a bit.
"We live abroad in China, and Greek is one of three languages my kids are learning."
right, but giving English-speaking kids the following would help them:
- a bear that looks like B
- an orange that looks like O
- a snake that looks like S
- a tree that looks like T
(and so on; that's just what I can think of off the top of my head)
Very nice, I can borrow the idea to teach also my kids :)
During undergrad years, IFC fraternity pledges had to memorize the Greek alphabet for obvious reasons. This is how the capital letters were taught amongst bros.
> However, I haven’t found any such cards for Greek characters, so I think mine are the first in Greek.
Huh? A simple web search shows many, many, many results.
I tried searching and even had Claude search in modern Greek and didn't find specifically cards with objects shaped like the letters.
Can you share what you found?
Search for Greek Flashcards.
Just did and still not seeing exactly what OP has made where the object looks like the letter. There are a few where the letters are abused to vaguely look like (use same texture) objects.
Maybe my Google foo sucks but could someone actually link what they're seeing?