How long did it take you to learn the greek alphabet?

[Hedonologist]

Greek was the only alphabet I've learned that I did in under a day, I suppose having already learned Cyrillic I was sort of cheating there. Greek is probably the closest to the Latin alphabet we use in most European languages so it makes sense to be the easiest to learn.

[Expressionism]

About a day or two to get a basic grasp, maybe a bit longer to memorize the order.

I've had the reverse experience, I'm trying to learn Russian and there's a lot of letters in Cyrillic that I found really easy to remember because of Greek.

[Antiquarian]

When it comes to the Greek alphabet, it took me a day to learn everything... and it took me a week to forget almost everything. I started to forget almost all of them once I used the alphabet less in my life. I need to revisit them and re-learn the letters. I still have interest in the Greek alphabet as well as Greek culture and thought.

Sincerely,

The Antiquarian.

[panos_gr]

A good way to freshen things up maybe this one:

http://memorize.com/greek-alphabet

Greek alphabet is among the few linguistic elements that have remained essentially unchanged between the Ancient and Modern Greek languages. It is approximately 2500 years old and identical to the one used by ancient Greeks!

[Ninna]

Wow, I´m impressed how quick people have learnt the Greek alphabets. I used to take Greek classes back to my home country once a week and we were learning the letters for two months. These days I´m living in Greece and enrolled to the classes again, I still sometimes struggle with certain letters. Maybe it´s because my native language is completely different from Greek. On the other hand I find speaking easier.

[evakes]

Hello Ninna!

I hope you are having great time here in Greece! You can check other topics to help you study Greek or you could propose a topic that would help you with the language.

If you were interested you could open a topic where we can discuss in Greek, for you and other members to practice writing,too!

[Rani]

The problem for me is that I can read and understand the Greek alphabet but do not ask me to recite it for you because I have totally forgotten the order and for the life of me, cannot remember how it goes. I have to say that as a recent Greek language student I find the combined letters that form other consonants and vowels really annoying, like μπ=b, ντ=d, ευ=f or v. On top of all that I really hate the τονος. I think I spend have my time to recognize where it goes and to apply it when pronouncing a letter. I mishear the τονος so often that I am starting to think that I am tone deaf.

[Archangelos]

You hate tonos?

Prior to 1981 we had a polytonic system (a writing system with many symbols like tonos).

[AureliaeLacrimae]

It's not difficult to learn the alphabet. It's not even that difficult to read. It's when you start working on texts that you give up. I did - I'd courageously started working on Oedipus. I'd lasted the whole page and then - nothing. Done. The metric was the easy part, but all those unknown words and tenses... now that can be very discouraging. I'd realised that had it not been for the translation in English, I wouldn't have understood a thing I'd read.

[rocketry]

The problem for me is that I can read and understand the Greek alphabet but do not ask me to recite it for you because I have totally forgotten the order and for the life of me, cannot remember how it goes. I have to say that as a recent Greek language student I find the combined letters that form other consonants and vowels really annoying, like μπ=b, ντ=d, ευ=f or v. On top of all that I really hate the τονος. I think I spend have my time to recognize where it goes and to apply it when pronouncing a letter. I mishear the τονος so often that I am starting to think that I am tone deaf.

Same here, the letters were easy enough to learn (and knew most of them from basic Maths & Physics courses already anyway) but I didn't see a point in memorizing the exact order.

[SpringBreeze]

The first time I tried to learn the Greek alphabet, I didn't. LOL! I gave up after about 2 or 3 weeks of studying. It was my first time trying to learn a foreign script. And it was literally "all greek to me". I finally got to understand that statement after that class.

A few years later, after a few more foreign language classes in college, I took a class on ancient Greek. And I have to admit, I was extremely surprised at how well I was learning the alphabet. Within a week, I had learned the alphabet. And I started getting A's on my tests. Needless to say, I was really happy and felt accomplished.

[AureliaeLacrimae]

The first time I tried to learn the Greek alphabet, I didn't. LOL! I gave up after about 2 or 3 weeks of studying. It was my first time trying to learn a foreign script. And it was literally "all greek to me". I finally got to understand that statement after that class.

A few years later, after a few more foreign language classes in college, I took a class on ancient Greek. And I have to admit, I was extremely surprised at how well I was learning the alphabet. Within a week, I had learned the alphabet. And I started getting A's on my tests. Needless to say, I was really happy and felt accomplished.

It can be frustrating! I have a thing for foreign scripts, so I guess it wasn't that difficult for me. My first foreign script was Cyrillic (not Russian Cyrillic, Serbian, though the two are very similar). Then I got interested in the runes and learnt Futhark. I tried Alphabet next. I guess it's easier with practice. The more different scripts you learn, the easier it gets for you to learn new ones. That's also why it was easier for you the second time. You may believe you'd forgotten those first weeks of torment, but you didn't. And they came in handy

[pesic87]

I studied Greek for 2 years at the university. The first year was the year where each and every one of us, the learners, thought that we have acquired the language, being so proud of ourselves, not knowing or rather being unaware that we were studying the language that kids in the kindergarten study. So, it was pretty easy, and it took me approximately a week to learn the alphabet by heart.

I loved Greek, and was pretty confident about it until I had it the second year. Then, most of us unfortunate ones, got disappointed, when a Greek teacher appeared one day, and when he opened his mouth. We were shocked. All of us that were so much confident about the language could not understand a single word that professor was uttering. The second year was truly devastating for me.

[innovativecat]

On 21/12/2015, 12:17:58, pesic87 said:

I studied Greek for 2 years at the university. The first year was the year where each and every one of us, the learners, thought that we have acquired the language, being so proud of ourselves, not knowing or rather being unaware that we were studying the language that kids in the kindergarten study. So, it was pretty easy, and it took me approximately a week to learn the alphabet by heart.

I loved Greek, and was pretty confident about it until I had it the second year. Then, most of us unfortunate ones, got disappointed, when a Greek teacher appeared one day, and when he opened his mouth. We were shocked. All of us that were so much confident about the language could not understand a single word that professor was uttering. The second year was truly devastating for me.

I could totally relate into this.  I'm glad I went to study greek formally after four years as I already have a little knowledge on the pronunciation. Greek people usually speak very fast too that's why it's very difficult to learn Greek just by listening.The greek language has easy alphabets that could be learned in one sitting but they have a wide vocabulary and difficult to pronounce words. 

[Kuro]

About 2 days to memorize the letters and another month to get it down perfectly. Yes, I'm bad at learning alphabets. xD