Jamming in Greek

Photo by Aleyna Rentz on Unsplash

I'm back to the Western social media after I spent one month in China without a VPN and therefore no access to Facebook, Youtube, Google, Wordpress based web pages and also my own blog. I was stuck with Baidu, Bing and Duolingo. Shortly before I left, I took part in a fun language challenge called Language Jam: http://languagejam.net/ by Lingudendron. It took only place for a weekend. Participants could choose if they want to learn a completely new language for one, two or three days. They could also choose if they wanted only a language with Latin script, only with non-Latin scripts or if they were open to every kind of writing system. I listed in the application all languages I have at least some basic knowledge and chose to learn a language with a non-Latin script for three days. Then the organiser of the challenge drew languages for all participants, the day before the challenge started. I didn't list Latin and Ancient Greek that I learnt at school, so when I got Modern Greek as the language for the challenge, I was at first slightly disappointed for not getting something more exotic but then luckily decided to stick with it. The languages other participants received were for instance: Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Dutch, Danish, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Mongolian, Serbian and many more. The task was to document the language learning activities on Instagram. It was really fun to see the different approaches everyone took to learn a language in a very short time.

I did have a headstart with Modern Greek. Thanks to my knowledge of Ancient Greek I knew the script and a lot of Greek words. But I couldn't remember much of the grammar, apart from the fact that there is a tense called Aorist. Also, I realised that I had no idea of Greek phonology. I always pronounced Ancient Greek the "German way". Especially the letters β (not b, but v), δ (not d but th like in "this") and the diagraphs μπ (mp = b) and ντ  (nt = d) were surprising to me.

So, how to learn a language if you have only three days and have to include the language study into your daily busy schedule? First I drew a mind map to make a plan.

Of course, I didn't manage to do all activities over the weekend but I did most of them. I didn't do so much in the grammar area and also didn't really read anything in Greek but I listened a lot to Greek podcasts, made short recordings and wrote little texts. You can follow my activities on my Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/miriamzeilinger/.

My favourite resource during the challenge and a real revelation was the course "Complete Greek" by Language transfer: https://www.languagetransfer.org/complete-greek. I never experienced such intuitive language learning before. They also offer other languages like Arabic, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swahili. Unfortunately, I could only listen up to lesson 20 or so and then while I was in China, I couldn't access the course anymore. I'm determined to finish the course now that I'm back in Germany.

I really enjoyed this short challenge and decided to keep studying Modern Greek. But as I couldn't access my favourite resources while in China, I just used Duolingo and wrote a couple of texts and uploaded them on italki. And I finished the whole Greek tree in a month. It's the second time that I finish a language tree on Duolingo. The first language was Spanish, still with the old system. Now I did Greek with the new crown system. It became a kind of obsession and I kept practising whenever I had some time to kill on a bus. But I'm still no fan of Duolingo. I'm ok with the crowns but I don't like the "health system" that keeps me from practising. Most of the time I was offline so I couldn't get health by practising lower skills or watching advertisements but I had to wait for several hours before I could continue. Also, there are some annoying bugs in the system that make it impossible to finish more crowns in certain skills (and just kill my health).

I don't understand how other people manage to retain anything by working with Duolingo. On one hand, it's too easy. Often the right answers can be guessed. On the other hand, it's not well balanced. It mainly trains passive skills. I can easily put a sentence together with the building blocks but it doesn't help much for retaining how to write the words, there are only a couple of exercises, where you have to actually type yourself, and it also doesn't help to create sentences freely. If at least there were some short texts for reading comprehension. Also, I don't like that I can't choose the order in which I want to learn the vocabulary. One of the first words I learnt in Duolingo was the word for "torch". And what's up with those turtles and ducks? They already annoyed me in the Spanish version. Only at the very end, there was some vocabulary, that I really wanted to learn. Anyway, I started two notebooks: one for sentences from Duolinguo and one for vocabulary from Duolingo. I hope that this will help me to get something out of the Duolingo experience. And now I'll have to plan how to continue with my Greek study.

Btw, the next language jam takes place from the 19th to 21st of October 2018. Check it out!

Music

Check out Marina Satti, a Greek-Sudanese singer: Article in the Huffington Post
I especially like her songs Mantissa and Koupes.

Greek reminds me a bit of Spanish because they also have voiced and unvoiced "th" sounds. Listen to this Greek parody of Despacito: Thes Pastitsio.