They reckon that dreaming in a second language is a big milestone. This morning my alarm clock rang at 7:45. I reset it for 8 and went back to sleep, to dream a voice saying with great surprise “Στις οχτώ;” (At eight?), and myself replying “Στις οχτώ.”
Could have just been Olga objecting I suppose.
Greek spelling is both wonderful and awful.
It’s wonderful because, completely unlike English, if you see a word written down you know exactly how to pronounce it. It’s awful because knowing how to pronounce a word still leaves you lots of options for how to spell it.
Today’s discovery is the verb “to use”: χρησιμοποιώ. Third person [...]
English: I keep my money in a “bank”; A river has “banks”. Not the same.
Dutch: I keep my money in a “bank”; You sit on a “bank” to watch tv (couch). Not the same.
Greek: I (could, if I were in Greece) keep my money in a “τράπεζα”. You eat dinner at the “τραπέζι” (table). Not [...]
I’ve got some kind of bizarro mental block going on with “Spain” in Greek. I confuse it with Israel and Japan.
There are reasons, but they’re kind complicated. First off, it’s pronounced roughly “IspanEEa”, which I visualise as “Ispania” (yup, visualising the Greek sounds in Latin letters, you can see where this is going to go [...]
I’ve started learning (modern) Greek, and I caught my first sentence in the wild this weekend. It was “I want a (cup of) tea” (θέλω ένα τσάι).
What’s that to be excited about, and what is “in the wild”? Well, it means it was
spoken by someone I don’t know well, in a context where many different sentences [...]
I had a close encounter with rockstardom last night. A bloke from De Dijk (keyboardist, according to Nikos) was at Dionysos where I went for an after-dinner dinner, and it turns out he plays baglama and bouzouki also. Hellenophiles get everywhere, it seems…