Welcome to the Listening Time podcast.
Hey English learners.
This is Connor and you're listening to episode 231 of the Listening Time podcast.
I hope you're doing great and that you're ready to practice your listening today.
And in this episode I'm going to talk about me learning Greek.
Because I have begun to learn.
I'm very excited to restart Greek.
I say restart and again because I learned Greek in the past.
I used to learn this language.
I used to study it, but I stopped for years.
And so I'm starting again.
It's been a long time since I've studied Greek.
I have a lot to relearn, but I'm very excited.
I started that last week, and so I want to talk about that in today's episode.
Remember that if these normal episodes have become pretty easy for you, then it's time for you to use my advanced podcast episodes, in which I speak fast.
The link to sign up for those is down below.
And also check out my US Conversations podcast, in which I talk to different English teachers from all around the US.
It's a lot of fun.
You learn a lot about the different states and regions of the country.
And it's great practice for your listening.
These are authentic conversations at full speed.
I provide the transcript for you.
And, of course, you can use this resource to find an English teacher who you can take classes with online, because I talk to many different English teachers on this podcast.
So check that out.
That link is also down below, all right.
First let me talk about my history with greek.
So i first started learning greek in 2018, a long time ago.
It doesn't seem like that long ago, But now that I count the years, I realize that that was a very long time ago.
And I learned with a teacher online.
I had a tutor.
And that was how I did a lot of my Greek study.
I think I had classes once or twice a week.
I can't remember exactly, but I learned with a teacher online and I also studied on my own.
I also did different things to practice my listening and learn vocabulary, etc.
And I stopped learning Greek around the end of 2020, I think.
It's a little hard to say when it was exactly, but it was around that time.
And so between 2018 and 2020, I learned Greek.
I studied this language.
I should say I studied modern Greek because there are different forms of Greek.
Greek is a very old language, so of course there are different forms.
It has evolved over time.
I'm learning modern Greek currently.
And so during those years from 2018 to 2020, I didn't study Greek super seriously.
In fact most of my language learning throughout my career as a language learner, I guess I'll say has not been super serious.
Recently, I've gotten more serious.
So from last year to this year, I've been... more seriously.
And when I first started learning languages, when I started learning Spanish, I did that super seriously.
But in the years in between, I just kind of learned languages as a hobby in my free time.
It was fun.
Now I treat it more seriously.
But during the time that I was learning Greek, I wasn't super serious about my study habits.
I didn't have goals with deadlines and I was really just trying to learn and study at a comfortable pace.
And I definitely learned a lot, but I never reached a level where I could comfortably have conversations in Greek.
I remember that I was able to have basic conversations with tutors.
I remember being able to talk about things in English very unnatural and slow way, but I was able to do that at least.
But, as you can tell, I did not reach a high level in Greek and I ended up stopping.
I stopped learning Greek and I started paying more attention to French, and I started learning French casually.
I think I had started learning French before that, but I had stopped.
So you can see that for years I started and stopped languages.
So now it's been years, four and a half years maybe, or perhaps a little more, since I last studied Greek.
So it's been a long time.
I am motivated and excited to relearn Greek, what I've forgotten, and to learn more.
Obviously, I want to reach a much higher level than the level I had when I stopped.
So why Greek?
Why am I learning this language?
There aren't tons and tons of native Greek speakers around the world.
Obviously there are native Greek speakers in Greece and Cyprus and in other countries, but this is not a very widely spoken language.
So why learn it?
Well, I think there are many reasons that someone might want to learn Greek.
I started learning Greek because I had the goal of one day being able to read the New Testament in Greek the New Testament of the Bible, because it was written in Greek.
Of course, that Greek is a little bit different from modern Greek, but not really different.
It's the same language but of course there are different words and phrases used and there might be some slight differences in some grammatical elements.
It sounds a little old, of course, but It's the same language at the end of the day.
So I had that as my initial goal.
But besides that, I also just found it to be a really cool language.
I love the sound.
It has a similar sound to Spanish and Italian, let's say, but it has some extra sounds that those languages don't have, and I like that.
The rhythm of the sentences,
It sounds really cool.
It's also a really interesting language because of its history.
As I already mentioned, Greek is a very old language, one of the oldest that we still have today.
Obviously, there were old languages in the past that no longer exist or they're not spoken.
But in terms of old languages that people still use, Greek is one of the oldest, so this is really cool because it has a ton of history.
And also, it used to be an extremely important language.
Greek was used as a lingua franca in the past, meaning different people used it to communicate even though it wasn't their first language, like people from different regions who didn't speak each other's language might use Greek to communicate, just like people might do with English today or French in some places, and definitely in the past, a lot of people used French for that reason.
So Greek has been an important language throughout history and it has had a a big impact on other languages.
Many people don't know this, but there are a ton of words in English and other languages that come from Greek.
There are tons of them.
So it's really cool to see this influence.
And it's also a nice challenge for me as well because, besides Greek, I've mostly just studied romance languages, languages that come from Latin, like Spanish French Portuguese Italian, etc.
So this is a harder language for an English speaker to learn.
It's more complicated for us and, of course, it uses a different alphabet, even though the Greek alphabet is not difficult.
It's a pretty easy alphabet to pick up, in my opinion.
But still, this is by far the hardest language that I've studied.
So it's a nice challenge.
And also my pastor is learning Greek as well, and that motivates me to want to learn, relearn what I've forgotten and move past that point and become conversational in Greek, hopefully.
And also, I really want to go to Greece one day, so that's another motivation.
There are a lot of reasons why I want to learn Greek, and so I have plenty of motivation.
I'm excited, as I said, and I've been learning for about a week now, and it's been interesting to see what it's like to relearn a language, to revive a language that you studied in the past, and Re-learning a language, reviving a language, is different from learning a new language.
Even if you think you've forgotten everything, it's different.
It's not the same.
I can see that very clearly now.
These things that I forgot are buried deep in my brain.
They're not completely gone.
When I hear that, certain words that I learned before, I immediately recognize them.
But five minutes before I saw them again, I would not have been able to tell you how to say that word in Greek.
And then once I hear it again, I immediately remember it.
So even though I've completely forgotten Thank you for watching.
And what's really interesting is, things are starting to come back to me, even though I haven't even relearned them yet, meaning no one taught me them, no one reminded me of them.
Like I'm starting to learn things that I've forgotten and then suddenly I remember another word that I forgot, even though nobody has re-taught me that word.
I'm starting to randomly remember how to say certain verbs.
It's really cool, to be honest.
It shows that when you learn a language to a certain level and then you leave it, You abandon it and then you revisit it.
You're not starting from scratch, meaning you're not starting from zero.
You have a lot of knowledge deep in your brain.
And I think it's really rewarding to revive these things, to bring them back to life and to reestablish these connections.
It's really cool.
I'm having a lot of fun so far. and it's been really rewarding.
And I hope that, because I'm relearning these words, I've already forgotten them and now I'm relearning them and I immediately recognize them when I relearn them.
I hope that this helps me remember them even even better now.
These connections that I'm reestablishing.
I hope that this will actually solidify these words even more now in my brain.
I think that will be the case, to be honest.
I think that there is a lot of value in forgetting something and then relearning it, reviving it in your brain.
I think that this really helps you remember it for even longer.
And so I think that if you let a language get rusty let's say you're learning Spanish and you decide to stop, and then you pick it up again after a while, just know that you haven't completely forgotten, lost everything that you've forgotten.
Okay, if you just see these words once, many times, it will immediately click, meaning you'll immediately understand them again.
So that's something that is reassuring.
I think something that is reassuring is something that makes you feel better, more assured.
So this is a reassuring thought.
You don't completely lose everything when you take a break from studying a language.
And I haven't stopped learning French.
So just because I'm starting to learn Greek again does not mean that I'm abandoning French.
In fact, French is supposed to remain my priority for the next couple of months, still meaning I'm supposed to be spending more time with French than with Greek.
And I'm trying to speak for a certain amount of time every day.
I speak mostly to myself.
I talk a little bit to my tutor myself.
But the majority of my speaking practice is just me speaking to myself.
And I'm trying to do that for a certain amount of time every day.
And I originally planned on just doing a little bit of Greek each day until I eventually make it my main priority in a few months.
But honestly, I've been so motivated to learn Greek this first week that I've done a lot more Greek study than I had originally planned on doing.
It's just really exciting for me right now.
I know that that excitement will diminish in the future, but right now it's really engaging, and so I don't want to waste this excitement.
I was thinking about this the other day because I realized that I'm spending more time learning Greek than I had originally planned, and I am okay with that, because I don't want this excitement, this motivation, to go to waste.
I want to embrace this excitement and just spend as much time as I want learning Greek while still doing French.
I've lost a lot of that excitement when it comes to learning French.
That happens when you learn a language for a long time.
It's not always super engaging and exciting.
I'm still motivated to learn French, but I'm really motivated to learn Greek and I want to utilize that motivation to help me study more, learn more, remember more, become more engaged with the language.
I really want to use that motivation to my advantage, as we say.
So I am learning more than I originally planned to.
I'm spending more time studying Greek than I thought I would.
But that's okay as long as I continue to practice my French and achieve my goals with that language.
Again in a few months, I'm going to make Greek my priority and decrease the amount of time that I spend learning French, but right now, French is still technically my priority and I'm learning both of these languages at the same time.
This is not something I have a ton of experience with.
I do have experience learning two languages at once, but most of my language learning has been done with just one language at a time.
So I'm learning and getting accustomed to doing two languages at once right now.
And it really helps to learn two languages at once if you're a lot better at one of them.
And that's my case.
I'm much better at French than I am at Greek, so that really helps.
And with Greek I'm trying a little bit of a different approach from my usual approach when I learn languages.
I think the fact that I'm relearning Greek also helps me experiment a little bit with different approaches, because I have a lot of these words deep in my brain already and I'm just trying to reactivate them and I'm not learning something completely new.
And so perhaps I don't need a really really good, perfect approach to study Greek at this point, especially while I'm just reviving what I've forgotten.
And I'm going to see if this approach works for me and I'll adjust what I do as I continue on with my learning, because I expect greek to be a language that i learned throughout my whole life.
Probably i don't think i'll ever feel like i've mastered greek, especially because there are different forms of greek and perhaps i'll want to start studying an older form of Greek in the future.
And, like I said, I want to be able to read the New Testament in Greek, so I'll probably spend more time with that type of Greek in the future.
There's a lot of work ahead of me.
When we say that there is something ahead of you, we're saying that you will encounter this in the future.
So I have a lot of work ahead of me.
I'm in no rush to reach a certain level by a certain point, unless perhaps I decide to go to Greece, like next year or something which could possibly happen.
Greece is my dream destination.
I really want to go there.
I don't want to live the rest of my life without having been to Greece.
So I really want to go there.
So if I buy tickets to go to Greece at some point then yeah, I will have a little bit more pressure and motivation too.
But aside from that, I imagine that I will continue learning Greek for a long time.
And so I think that I can try some different approaches, approaches experiment a little bit, because that's part of my job.
I learn languages and see what is helpful, what is less helpful, which techniques work more or less for me, so that I can also give advice on this.
I'm not a professional language learner.
I'm not a polyglot who has a ton of experience with tons of different languages.
I'm a student of languages, i'm trying to learn and get better at learning them, and so i think it's nice to experiment a little, try some different methods and see what works.
So that's my current situation.
I'm learning Greek as well as French, and Greek will become more of a priority in the near future as well.
So I'm really excited and I can't wait to go deeper into this world of Greek.
Thank you.
And for many of you, you need to start listening to content where more than one person is talking.
This is an essential skill.
You have to be able to understand people in group settings.
So I made the US Conversations podcast to help you practice with this.
So go down below and click on the link to check out that podcast.
And you can also see, if you like, any of those English teachers who I talk to, so you can take a class with them.
All right, thank you all for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
