Learning the Greek Alphabet

[Pommy]

Hey,
Well next year I am taking classical Greek, but I want to get ahead a little and learn the Alphabet in advanced.
Do you guys find anything particularly helpful in memorizing it?
Or should I just resort to the classic writing them a million times deal?

Thanks.

[GTM]

This might help.

I didn't check it out that closely so you might want others to take a look before you use it.

http://www.luthersem.edu/jboyce/LG1200/alphabet.htm

[Essorant]

This is a good and concise outline from the book A Reading Course in Homeric Greek.

[Scribo]

I definitely suggest learning it first. I learnt it over the summer, prior to starting Greek, it was a huge help. My girlfriend happens to be Greek, we spent many an hour going over the basics. Poor her...it took me ages to actually learn the damn thing (and even longer to learn the dipthongs...)

Learning it is fun though, you get to practice making your letters pretty.

[Anastasia]

This might not work for everybody, but sometimes my students would practice the alphabet by writing out English words in Greek letters.

[Scribo]

I found that a pointless exercise, better to practice with Greek names and the like...

[thesaurus]

Writing it a million times worked for me (and it also worked for the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets). The trick is to try to write out as much as you can from memory before you get stuck, then cross-reference the ones you missed, then try again and again. You'll gradually fill in all the gaps and then write the whole thing from memory.

It may help to break down the list of letters into groups of five or so, and try to focus on them in sets. This way it's not one nebulous mass of characters, but small sets that you can memorize.

[Essorant]

Why don't you learn the rest of the language in advance, too?

[Lex]

I always confused two sequences of letters until I came up with mnemonics.

With zeta, eta, theta it is easy to flip them around. I remember it by thinking of how the "word" made by the sound of each letter, Z-E-TH, is sorta like the word "zeta" itself.

With phi, chi, psi, I have another mnemonic. F-K-PS, with a few vowels thrown in, sounds a lot like "f*ckups".

[peterp]

Learning the greek Alphabet is tricky so if you truly can't get it try getting a kids book they help my greek cousin nikko learned that way i learned it from a class

[grdSavant]

Well good. I have been looking for a measure of how difficult it would be learning this stuff. It took me two weeks to do the alphabet and I thought that seemed excessive--but I guess that time-frame is okay. For me, I used: http://ucbclassics.dreamhosters.com/anc ... lphaU.html from the Berkeley Language Center of the University of California, which also has an easily usable audible pronunciation of them. Hearing them and speaking was an important component for me -- as well as writing the alphabet, a lot, too.

[Superavi]

Here is a youtube video of a man teaching kids the Greek alphabet in ten minutes. He makes a little story out of the alphabet, and it will help you memorize the names and the sequence of them. From there you just need to work on how to write them out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0gUfuWoHJA