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If it's all Greek to you...

greek letters
Greek language has a reputation for being a difficult language (hence the famous English saying). This is probably due to some of the Greek alphabet's unfamiliar characters rather than the language structure or grammar.

In this section of the All Greece 4U web site, we look at the Greek language from a purely practical point of view. There are several excellent books, CDs and online resources for those who want to learn Greek - check our books and useful links sections.

Here, we offer some tips and general advice, based on experience, that hopefully can help you on your trips to Greece. We welcome your own tips, tales and adventures with the Greek language.

The 24 letters of the Greek alphabet
the Greek alphabet
Here they are in capitals and lower case. We have colour-coded them for you to make easy to remember:

GREEN - they look and sound as in English (although the lower case letters are written differently).
ORANGE - they sound like some English letters but look different.
RED - they are all vowels but watch out - their sound is not always as expected. See below.
GREY - the awkward ones! New sounds for you to learn.

Click here for a full pronunciation guide.

The vowels
the greek vowels
Here is the alphabet again - this time only the vowels are in colour. Vowels in the same colour sound exactly the same! (Their subtle differences have been lost through time.)

There is one more vowel sound 'oo' as in book.
In Greek, it's written as the vowel 'oo' in Greek

Two-letter sounds

As well as the 'OY' sound, the following groups of two letters make a new sound:
two-letter combinations
Click here for a full pronunciation guide.

Notice that there are 5 different ways to write the 'ee' sound (like kid, bid, igloo, in English):
different ways to write 'ee'
...there 2 different ways to write the 'e' sound (like egg, hen, beg):
different ways to write the sound 'e'
... and 2 different ways to write the 'o' sound (like box, fox, lot)
different ways to write the sound 'o'
Good luck!


Check our books section for a selection of books and other resources on the Greek language.

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Positive thinking!

If the task of learning Greek seems enormous, just think that you already know thousands of Greek words.
They are words that found their way into English directly or through Latin.

Below are some examples together with the Greek word.
Try to pronounce them in Greek using our pronunciation guide.

airplane
word 'airplane' in Greek
bacteria
the word 'bactiria' in Greek
calligraphy
the word 'calligraphy' in Greek
decathlon
the word 'decathlon' in Greek
echo
the word 'echo' in Greek
fanatic
the word 'fanatic' in Greek
galaxy
the word 'galaxy' in Greek
helicopter
the word 'helocopter' in Greek
ideology
the word 'ideology' in Greek
kilometre
the word 'kilometre' in Greek
labyrinth
the word 'labyrinth' in Greek
metropolis
the word 'metrolopis' in Greek
organisation
the word 'organisation' in Greek
paragraph
the word 'paragraph' in Greek
radiology
the word 'radiology' in Greek
skeleton
the word 'skeleton' in Greek
telephone
the word 'telephone' in Greek
xenophobia
the word 'xenophobia' in Greek
zone
the word 'zone' in Greek

places in Greece
the greek language
food and drink
road user guide


'TONNOS' -
a useful friend

The small accent sign (tonnos) you find in most Greek words, helps us to pronounce words correctly.
It indicates which syllable of a word is stressed.
One-syllable words do not need a tonnos of course (although there are couple of exceptions).

QUESTIONS

 The Greek sign for a question mark is like the English semi-colon (;)

In Greek, to change a sentence into a question, you just raise the tone - the structure of the sentence remains the same.

NUMBERS
Watch out!

Please note that in Greece decimals are shown by a comma (,) and thousands by a full stop (.)

For example:
1.000,00
a thousand

 

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