Greek to Me

Right. So I've got the Alphabet down. I can say it all the way through, I can recognize the letters by name and sound, and I've got the vowel and consonant combinations (which are rather confusing, to be honest) all but down. There are still some letters that prevent me from reading words as a whole (as opposed to sounding them out), and those are, of course, the awful letters that look like one and are another. I've gotten used to "v" being "n", but not so much the "n" (with tail) being "i". X pretending to be H can get annoying, too, especially since theres this word, alarming in it's false simplicity, written "Xaipete". No scary letters, but believe you me, it's pronounced, "Harete".

Yes, the "p" pretends to be an "r", but the only time that catches me is when I'm still recovering from something hard like a capital "ksi". I know the misleading letters, but I can't see and feel them yet. It makes sense, as I have 10 years of conditioning the first way, and 2 days of the second. And capital letters take a good half a second longer to remember; not much unless youre going for reading proficiency. (Always the goal with an alphabet, of course). Getting there, though...

At that point, I started working on the first chapter of the book. It's pretty dense, for a "Teach Yourself" title. One page had no less than 5 or 6 ways to say hello and 6 or 7 ways to say goodbye. Actually, that part was confusing enough that they included a table showing times of day on the y axis and whether it was a greeting, farewell, or response on the x axis. Too bad I didn't see that until I had made the flashcards and incorrectly labled "Have a Good Afternoon." as "Good Afternoon."

All in all though, things have been progressing decently. It's not easy, but neither is it hard. Perhaps my new standard, a middle road? "Harder than Greek!" implies hair tearing, and "Easier than Greek!" implies easy afternoons lazily adding word after word to my mental ghlossia. :D I think that line of thinking puts French right on the easy side of Greek, and Latin right on the hard side. But I have yet to delve very deeply into two of those three... Scary Thought.