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Τάβλι might as well be the national game of Greece. This is a collection of three different board games, which are played in sequence with the same board and pieces. The first of these games is common in America as backgammon, while the other two have similar rules, but capturing pieces has different meanings between the three. The games are played in groups of three over and over between two people until one of them has accumulated 10 total wins.

Τάβλι is especially popular with the old men in Greece, but pretty anyone can whip out a board the moment you ask: Να παίξοθμε τάβλι;

Adding to the list of things I didn’t think about in the past which seem fairly obvious now is that in Greece, they play different sports than we do I America. While children here play basketball and football, and some of the adventurous ones shoot and go mountain biking, in Greece they mostly swim and play soccer, volleyball, and a little basketball. They do not seem to particularly enjoy expensive sports or those that are full-contact or dangerous. It seems that Americans might prefer to have fun with the thrill of danger while the Greeks are more conservative in their play.

In one of my conversations with Smaragda, we talked about how Greek and Americans perceive coffee. I had never put much thought into this topic before, but she asked me why Americans would think that there could be such a thing as “regular coffee.” She contends that there cannot be such a thing, since espressos, cappuccinos, lattes, filter coffee, Greek coffee, and other variations are all just parts of a subset in a category called “coffee.” In Greece, such an idea is unthinkable, and someone who asks for “regular” coffee would be treated with a blank stare or a restated question. We did our research, and learned that while many different countries influenced Greece’s coffee habits, America’s came only from England or France in 1773, and those countries produced filter coffee. Most of the others didn’t come along and become recognized until centuries later, when the idea of what coffee is had been firmly fixed in the American mind. I continue to be amazed at how differently two cultures can perceive something so simple as coffee. I still have a lot to learn, even when I thought I had a pretty good handle on Greek culture.

Greeks are some of the most strong-willed people the world  probably has when it comes to their culture. I find this somewhat ironic, that they will stiffly resist anything from Turkey, but many of their words, recipes, coffee, and place names are of Turkish origin. Most of these influences come from Constantinople, while Greeks adamantly refuse to call the city Istanbul as the Turks do. Theirs is not necessarily flag-waving patriotism so much as an insistence on the integrity of their culture. This comes as no surprise, since Greece has a holiday on the 28^th of October sometimes called Όχι Day, literally “No!” Day, celebrating the Greek Prime Minister in 1940 refusing to be coerced into a compromising agreement with Italy, which then started their role in World War 2.

To my ears, Greek music largely sounds the same. To help train my ears differently, Smaragda and I studied songs for a week or two. One of the hallmarks of Greek folk music is the        Μπουζούκι. This is an instrument which resembles and sounds like a mandolin, but it has a neck as long as a guitar. We studied several songs, but spent special times analyzing the lyrics of one called “Αγγελέ Μου”, and a song called “Το Κορίτσι”, a pop song and an alternative song, respectively, to compare the different genres in Greek music. Maybe all Greek music doesn’t sound the same, but it is much harder to hear differences when I can’t understand the lyrics.

Coming out of winter, Smaragda told me that it wasn’t fair that I only visited Greece at Christmas, because it did not give a good look at the country the way it is meant to be seen. “Greece was made for the summer,” she said, “so you cannot have an opinion until you’ve seen it in both winter and summer.”

I talked with Myrsini and Andreas about my visit, and they both made the same complaint. According to Andreas, summer is a time for the young men to visit bars and get into trouble. Smaragda and Myrsini preferred to use summer as a time to drink coffee, go to the beach, and visit bars. They said to expect maybe 4 hours per night of sleep, since the rest of the day has to be spent doing these three things.

Smaragda has had a book for many years called Σταυροδρόμι των Ψυχών, The Crossroads of the Soul. Normally, it wouldn’t be my first choice of book, but I’m excited that I understand a fair number of words in the first couple pages. If she weren’t there to point out some of the other words, I surely wouldn’t be able to piece it all together, but we read through the first page or two in an almost reasonable amount of time. I’m not much of a romance novel reader, but Σταυροδρόμι των Ψυχών is the only Greek book I have read from, and the ability to read makes me happier than the content necessarily does.

We did a segment on Greek patriotism of Greek Independence Day. Smaragda gave me a song called “Παλληκάπι Είκοσι Χρονώ”, “A Young Lad of 20 Years”. This song tells of a young man who returns from an uneventful war, only to be killed on his way back in a place called Γκιούλ Μπάξες, the Rose Garden (also translated as Pomegranate Garden). We talked about how everything shuts down except for restaurants, and how everyone goes out to eat after the parades hosted by local schools.

Following in the vein of sports and games, we had a class meeting which looked at the rules and etiquette for card games, and things to say during a card game. Smaragda taught me some vocabulary including “to shuffle”, “to deal”, “to bet”, “to win”, and “to lose”. She made me spend the rest of class constructing sentences from these words and vocab we already covered in the Sports & Games section. This way, I will be able to do more than just silently play a hand of poker. We learned more than just the vocabulary, but made sure that I could play some of the more common card games played in Greece. Backgammon is very popular in Greece, so we learned a few terms about it as well. Θέλεις να παίξομε χαρτιά;

On a wild hair, we decided to dedicate a few classes to learning about sports and games. I had mixed feelings learning about this topic. Sporty feeling was in the air, in the wake of March Madness, and with the weather getting a little bit warmer. I’m eager to learn about these topics, so that I might be able to speak about and offer to play with others in Greek. Many of the names for sport are foreign, such as “Μπάσκετ” (“Basket”, basketball). However, a great number of them only have Greek names that would be recognizable to Greeks, such as ορεινή ποδηλασία (mountain biking). My concern for these is that their names for sports tend to be very long, and will be a bit of a struggle to memorize. Fortunately, many of the games have shorter names than the sports, and most of the verbs and people associated with sports have some connections to English. I anticipate that my challenge here will be just memorizing sports names.

We have embarked on another unit of pronouns, this time focusing on indefinites. These are easier to remember, because parts of the words are found in other words, such as καθένας (every one), whose root, κάθε, “every”, is found in words like καθεμέρα, “everyday”. Every one of the indefinite pronouns (or at least the ones we covered) has a recognizable root in other Greek words, so they are not at all difficult to keep track of: much better than memorizing the definite pronouns, which have nothing to recall any parts of their meaning, except their endings to indicate person, number, and gender. They melt into other words and become indistinguishable to me in speech. Even though these past few class meetings have been about indefinite pronouns, I will still be spending more of my energy on remembering the definite ones.

This week we launched into pronouns with in full force, and saw how they and our other topics fit into lyrics from popular Greek songs. I really enjoyed listening and reading through the songs. I have always had trouble understanding Greek songs because I will catch one word and then get swept away by the beat. This practice was fun and helped me get used to the words that commonly get elided or sound differently than in prose.

Hopefully, by hearing words in different contexts, prose versus more poetic, I can start to understand idioms more gracefully. After translating and singing a few pages of Greek, my goal is to have to improve my voice quality more than my pronunciations.

In these past few weeks, Smaragda and I discussed the different endings attached to words to signify size or quality. These include endings to show whether the noun were a place where something is found, a place where there is a lot of something, large, or small. These would be simple enough, except that there are several endings for each of these, and each of these changes by case, number, and gender, adding up to several hundred endings to modify nouns. These took some remembering, but I’ve gotten a decent grasp on general endings, so it hasn’t been too bad, especially since I was already familiar with some of the ones which meant “little”. However, we’ve also started covering pronouns. There are hundreds more of these to learn, even just scratching the surface, so I’m a bit concerned as to how well I’ll be able to handle those.

We started off the semester by reflecting on what I learned while we were in Greece. After returning, I could have kicked myself for my shyness. Many times, I would think of something which I knew I could say in Greek, but I would usually hold myself back. My fear of slipping up or taking too long to say a simple phrase would paralyze me and keep me from offering a simple thought to Smaragda’s family or friends. It was more the awareness of the fact that I would speak slowly that would impede my speech than anything else, even though the “language hacking” video encourages us to speak despite ourselves.

Many of the people I met in Greece did not speak much or any English, so we would not be able to speak except through Smaragda, who was sometimes not around to interpret. This led to many instances of me sitting around looking at someone and just nodding or smiling for long periods of time.

If I could have done anything differently in Greece, I definitely would have spoken up more.

Legislative violence is a very common occurrence in newer democracies. It even dates back to ancient Roman times where discourse in the legislature was settle with violence. Even America had instances of violence in its early years as an independent country. Despite being highly developed, South Korea is still a new democracy. It only had a handful of democratically elected presidents apart from dictators and colonized rule. Because they are still in their infancy, brawls like these and verbal abuse happen from time to time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XcMN6E9B44

This is a conversation script I had with Sarah. With the help of my language partner, I had to use several slang words in the conversation to talk about a new restaurant that opened. This lesson was very useful because I use Kakaotalk to talk to others in Korean a lot. While there is still a lot of new slang words that I am unfamiliar with, I learned a fair amount of new words to use in my everyday talking.

This is an example of a diary entry I completed during the semester. Diaries are a common homework assignment in South Korea and I recall doing many diary entries while attending elementary school in Korea. 

This is a Korean dish called Seolleongtang. It is a beef bone broth soup with sliced beef in it. This is one of my favorite dishes to order at Grandmart. This dish is most popular when the weather is cold and is served in a stone bowl to retain longer. Many believe that broth based dishes were popularized long ago when people had to feed the most amount of people with the least amount of ingredients. 

I have enjoyed every semester of SDLC.  I feel confident in my ability to have a brief conversation in Indonesian.  SDLC has helped me realize how unique language is.  Before SDLC, I would have had no idea how to study a language like Indonesian.  I especially would not have had the interaction with the culture that I was able to have through Bu Julie and Thalia.  I enjoyed every class and look forward studying after I graduate college.  

I have come to understand when to use “bukan” and “tidak” correctly.  These words are used to show negation.  Tidak is used to negate verbal predicates that are composed of verbs, adjectives, or prepositional phrases.  Bukan is used to negate nominal phrases.  When deciding which word to use, the person who responds must understand what is being asked in order to properly respond.  I have learned how to do this by looking at sentences that have both nominal and verbal predicates and practice negating each predicate.  It has really helped to break up sentences and look at it in sections.