Greek

As of July 2026, I potentially have a two week trip to Greece coming up in September. It barely crossed my mind to learn any of the language, until my mom made a comment: "Are you going to learn Greek?". I scoffed and said, "of course not."

But the seed was planted. Once rooted in my mind, it started to feel inevitable for me to at least learn a little bit about the language and see what beginner resources are out there for learning it.

But still, I must address the question: Do I really need to learn any Greek?

Perhaps no -- English is pretty regularly used there, from what I've been reading. However, I think it vastly enriches the travel experience to learn at least just a little bit.

At minimum, my goal is to learn some vocab and some very basic grammar. It would be nice to know the alphabet well enough to be able to at least read/pronounce signs and menu items, for example.

How far will I go into the language? I don't know. It might not be very far. But I'm viewing it as a mini language-learning project which probably will terminate after the Greece trip. Or, who knows, maybe I'll find myself want to go further with it even afterwards. (More likely though, I think there's a chance it will reinvigorate me back towards learning more Japanese and Spanish, which are my primary language learning goals at this time.)

Learning method

I took a glimpse at Duolingo. Two things drove me away:

1. The last time I used Duolingo was probably ten years ago when I was boosting my Spanish ability. I returned to the app now, and... my god - I did not like what I saw. Not only was I bugged by the constant Duoling-owl-as-superhero animations which add an annoying, forced pause between the too-short lessons, but I also quickly hit the free-tier daily limit of lessons I was able to complete. I don't recall such limits (or annoying animations) back when I was doing Spanish. I get it -- they've got to make money. But I'd call it an example of enshittification. Maybe some people are willing to deal with those things. But I could not. Why should I limit myself to a platform that wants to limit my learning progression (literally limiting the amount I can progress in a day).
2. Also, I saw people's opinions on Reddit that the Greek Duolingo course isn't very good.

So, as of now, I have landed on a dual approach for my own "study" routine:

1. Anki vocab deck
   • (Anki is software for studying vocab through spaced repetition.)
   • I feel a bit funny about this, but I am using an AI-generated vocab deck. My only worry is that there could be some inaccuracies or missed nuances - but honestly, the words are simple enough that I think it's unlikely. But otherwise, it's feeling useful. I wanted a vocab deck specifically geared towards a short trip -- mainly vocab around food, signs, transport, etc. I worked with ChatGPT to generate the Anki deck, and in my opinion, it did a pretty good job.
2. Language Transfer audio course (free)
   • https://www.languagetransfer.org/greek
   • This is a long course. But it's a quite engaging way to learn the language. There's more emphasis on grammar than expansive vocab (though it does slowly introduce vocab), which is why I'm doing Anki for vocab.
   • Reminds me of the Pimsleur audio course for Japanese, which I used when learning some Japanese basics prior to my trip to Japan in high school. (only progressed a little bit through it.)

To briefly update on this -- at least as of August, I've not been making much progress here. I had gone through about 11-12 lessons of Language Transfer, and I genuinely enjoyed it, and all things equal I would totally consider it. I also learned a couple dozen vocab words (mostly related to food) in the AI-generated Anki deck, and enjoyed that as well. However, when it comes down to it, it hasn't been a high priority to me to continue. I think it's a good thing for me to focus on other things that are more important to me right now (general life stuff, work, other creative endeavors, etc). Honestly don't see myself continuing Greek in general after my trip. However, I would not say at all that what I did so far was a waste of time. It was fun, gave me a glimpse into how another language worked, definitely exercised the language-learning muscle in general, and reminded me of the fun of language learning. I think this will be a good factor getting me to dive back into continuing my study of Japanese.

Also, retrospectively, the vocab deck was much too ambitious, with a lot of words I wouldn't have a particular reason to say while traveling, though I guess I was imagining that I could just learn them all and just have breadth in what I knew. But realistically, I feel like I should have (or should still) just learned a couple dozen basic social phrases because that's realistically the things I might actually genuinely want to say in Greek while there.