The opportunity given to me to advance my knowledge of my mother-tongue has been incredibly fulfilling despite the challenges I faced during the semester. Although I cannot say that I have reached my goal of being able to write an academic paper in Greek, I can say that I am well on my way of achieving this goal. I have definitely improved my speaking and reading skills through the assistance of my language partner and various learning activities. My reading of advanced Greek comes far more naturally than it did at the beginning of the semester and I have begun to see patterns and similarities in words that are found in common, modern Greek which helps a lot in deciphering the meaning of words and even entire texts. During my attempts to work on my reading I found that the hardest part was patiently looking up numerous words per page in dictionaries in order to understand the text, which was often frustrating. This frustration was only remedied through the positive results of my speaking sessions with my language partner, when I applied some of these words in our political conversations.
As for speaking, my language partner has noted a dramatic improvement in the clarity of my speech and the quick use of vocabulary. This was important for me because I used to often find myself stuck in the middle of conversations trying to remember Greek words for certain things or actions, which in my perspective was embarrassing when Greek is technically my mother-tongue. During the semester, I found that reading out loud was a great way to work on pronunciation of complex words and clarity of speech, and it also helped me memorize vocabulary from the books I read.
I decided to stop my writing lessons relatively early on in the course for two reasons. First, because my writing abilities are far behind my speaking and reading skills it would be hard to try to learn advanced Greek and then have to revert to simpler, everyday Greek for the sole purpose of practicing spelling, writing styles, and grammatical rules. Second, I found that learning to read, understand, and speak academic level Greek was a major task and adding writing to that list would be overwhelming and discouraging due to the sheer amount of work I would have to invest.
Outside of the actual results of my Greek learning experience, I was able to gain great insight on the type of learning activities that help me learn. After viewing movies in Greek, watching the news, and reading historical books I found that the latter method was the most effective. This is because I was able to see the spelling of words which helped me in pronunciation and also in deciphering meaning from related or root words. Furthermore, seeing the words and sounding them out in my head or out loud helped develop my vocabulary. Lastly, I found the books very enjoyable which motivated me to continue reading, as well as, immensely educational since they taught me a great deal about Greek modern diplomatic and military history. The least interesting aspect of my learning experience was by far the time spent deciphering sentences that utilized ancient Greek (which many academic authors do to showcase their intellectual capabilities I suppose). Ancient Greek is vary different from modern Greek and it is almost as if its a different language.
In the future I plan to continue my study of Greek. Thankfully, I am studying abroad in Greece next semester and I am taking several advanced Greek language courses which will allow me to further develop my language skills along with my personal reading sessions. All this exposure to the language will hopefully one day translate to the privilege of having to decide whether to write my research papers in Greek or English. What an incredible conundrum that will be!
