I can't learn Greek. Honestly, I have tried time and time again. I've never really been much of a language person but I don't remember having this much trouble with French or German at school, and that was not only without any genuine interest but also without the advantage of living in those countries. It has nothing to do with the different alphabet - I got that part fine, in fact I'd managed to learn the Greek script almost completely during one long bus journey in London before I moved. And with Greek being a phonetic language, that means I can read all the Greek words around me and know how they should be pronounced (mostly). But that doesn't seem to help at all. It's not just the complicated grammar that I'm having trouble with either - I can't even get to a point where correct grammar is vaguely relevant!

Anyway, this summer I'm going to try again, but with a little more commitment and lower expectations. Basically, my goal this time is to learn just two words each day (any two words, I don't care how useful they might be) but to learn them permanently. Because that is essentially the problem. I can sit all day in a cafe learning Greek from one of the many books/audio courses that I keep buying, and it all goes in quite easily, but falls straight back out even faster. After investing 5/6 hours in trying to learn some Greek, I manage to forget 90% of it during the 20 minute walk home and the last 10% quietly slips away throughout the rest of the evening, even when I remember to jog my memory with it all before going to bed - next morning, nothing! It simply won't stick.

My new strategy is based on the idea of connecting words to pictures and other forms of stimulus, which is an idea I've heard of many times as an aid to learning that I thought was probably true enough, but hardly necessary. This is because I never had any trouble learning or remembering the usual academic type things, so I didn't give this associative memory technique (I don't know it's proper name) a lot of thought until now. Basically, what happened is that I was sitting here going through one of the Greek "flash card" sets at flashcardexchange.com when I came across the word "iparhi" meaning "there is". That rang a bell. I have a track in my music collection by Greek artist Helena Paparizou from an album called Iparhi Logos and though I'd never really paid any attention to this name, obviously I'd absorbed it somehow because I made the connection immediately. I looked up "logos" in a Greek dictionary to complete the translation but found that it was not quite so simple. Out of context there is more than one direct translation of "logos". So I emailed a Greek friend to find out which would be the best translation in this case. He told me "there's a reason" is almost certainly the translation in this context and also offered a different example where logos means "word": έχεις το λόγο μου (you have my word).

So now I have two words, iparhi and logos, along with visual and auditory associations (courtesy of Helena Paparizou) and two phrases to put them in context. I have no doubt that I will remember them now. And when I think back over the few Greek words I have actually managed to learn, I realise that in all of those cases I learnt them in circumstances more memorable than sitting in a cafe reading a book. It also occurred to me that even if I only managed to learn two words like this each day, this time next year I would presumably have a Greek vocabulary of more than 700 words. And that really ought to be enough to start understanding what people say, which I think is the key to being able to start "picking up" the language from people around me the way I always expected would "just happen" when I first moved here. After living in Greece for around 4 years now, the language does feel familiar to me, so I ought to have formed plenty of subconscious connections with many of the words, even though I don't yet know what they mean. So I am hoping that each day, if I try, I will find at least two such words that have been staring me in the face all this time and learn what they mean. Then I'm going to find a couple of phrases to use them in context and write something about them in this blog, just as an added stimulus. Let's see how this goes...