Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language

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mingshey
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Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language

Post by mingshey »

The highschool I teach Physics at is attached to a University, which focuses on foreign language majors. (It is one of the reason I chose the school to work at. :))
Recently the univ gave teachers in the highschool the access to the library, and I visited the library last week.
There I found a Modern Greek Grammar, David Holton, et al.'s "Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language". It looks quite good to me.
Anyone used this book? If so, how do you rate this? (if it's good enough, up to date, κτλ.)

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IreneY
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Post by IreneY »

I'm afraid I will start looking into Greek grammars for non-Greek native speakers in a few months, but a little bit of googling came up with nothing but praise for this book.
Some results by Greek sites I trust include this, an exellent article from one of the authors here (citing this grammar in the bibliography to boot), and this which actually lists quite a few grammar books for MG (the last section, titled "3. Ξενόγλωσσες γ?αμματικές" lists some other Greek grammar books in other languages)
Note that I know the person posting this list and his knowledge of Greek grammar is quite, quite good (I used to frequent that site till I got lazy :D) Last but not least (there are many more results mind you) the Centre of Greek language (to which the first link also belongs) lists it here as one of the books to be used to teach modern Greek as a second language.

The first of the links, one of the best around describes its authors as having both the knowledge and the experience for a succesful work.
The book belongs to the series of basic grammars (Essential Grammars) of the publishing house and is a compendious but adapted and finished of one of the more extensive grammars.
It is a simplified presentation (simplified in relation to an indepth analysis) of the modern language (written and oral speech) and is designed for beginners, adult English speaking people learning Greek.
The whole, rather long review ends by saying that in conclusion, it is the frst of its kind for beginners, containing all the basic ellements that these people can possibly need, written in a simple and easy to understand way with structure and presentation that make it accessible to its user. They also consider the bibliography at its end a very useful tool since it includes all the basic teaching textbooks, grammars and dictionaries that one can look for and study.

Edit: I've not included any English results since well, you can check them out yourself :D Oh, and I owe you one for this.

mingshey
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Post by mingshey »

Great thanks, IreneY!
A brief browsing in amazon.com shows there are two books by the same authors. "A Comprehensive..." and "An Essential ..." Grammars. Many of the reviews seem to refer to the "Essential" one. If the Essential one is rated so good, I think the Comprehensive one by the same authors should be more complete and preferable as a reference. (Eh, one of the amazon reviewers down -rated it for being too comprehensive. :?)
If there's some reason I should consider getting the Essential Grammar along with the Comprehensive one, please let me know.

Ευχά?ιστω,
Μίγξει.

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IreneY
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Post by IreneY »

No, not really. The Essential is, from what I understand, an abridged" version of the Comprehensive one. You choose really. My personal opinion, given your background inAncient Greek is that you could very well go for the Comprehensive one if you so choose. I got the feeling that the Essential is easier to tackle for someone who first encounters the Greek language in any form by studying Modern Greek. Given the fact that MG is actually a simplified version of AG and that someone who knows AG will probably have questions of a more complicated nature than your average beginner, maybe it's even better to go for the Comprehensive. That, of course, is just my opinion but I may be completely off. The only certain thing is that you don't need both.

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