I first started Dublin in Greek in September of last year and trust me when I say that finding resources for it has not been an easy thing to do which is basically why I'm making this video today to share what I have been able to find so far so if you are someone who's learning Greek or maybe you're just thinking about it and not sure if you'll be able to find resources to study this video is for you today I'll talk about textbooks graded readers apps podcasts YouTube channels and so much more let's start with textbooks for me when I learn a language I really like to have a book to help me create a structure for my learning process and let me tell you that finding a textbook that I like was not easy I finally settled on these two textbooks communicate in Greek for beginners and Greek for you both of these books are series communicate in Greek I think has two volumes and Greek for you has books for a0 A1 A2 and so on Greek for you or elinikayasas is actually the textbook that my italki tutor was using so I decided to get it too I actually really like this textbook it has a lot of different formats of text and exercises for example instead of mostly using dialogues it has actual text and dialogues unlike some other books that I've seen it also lists all of the new vocabulary for each chapter so you don't have to look for translations yourself the chapters in The Textbook are short but the workbook is very thorough and sometimes it even feels like they give you way too many exercises another nice little gesture that I really like about this book is this exercise in the end of each chapter where you were given lyrics to a famous Greek song and you have to fill the gaps while listening to it and I think it's a really nice way to expose Greek Learners to Greek pop culture communicate in Greek is an English version of this textbook called Epic this currently is my main textbook that I use because I find it to be much less demanding than Greek for you what I like about this book is its grammar explanations they're much more detailed here unlike Elena's where you pretty much just get a table but what I don't necessarily appreciate is how there's no vocabulary list so every new word that you find in the book would have to be looked up either in a dictionary or the glossary that the book provides you obviously don't have to use both at the same time I would say that if you want a textbook that is really comprehensive and goes far beyond just things like traveling and trivial everyday life things get Elena but if you want a textbook that you won't have to spend too much time with communicating Greek might actually be a better choice for you so these were the books that I use but I also cannot not not mention three Alternatives like the edoxy textbook so the book was created for teenagers whose first languages are either Arabic or Persian but they also have English translations and the book basically has useful grammar and vocabulary to talk about things like shopping going to the doctor talking about oneself and one's family and so on these books were actually created by a Greek NGO that helps facilitate the reception and integration of refugees and immigrants in Greece so you can download those books for free but also if you can please consider donating I'll leave the links in the description taking a little break from Greek resources because I have a little announcement for you guys and that is that I have started a patreon account what should you expect here I'm honestly still figuring things out and will probably be adding more perks and tears in the future but for now we have two the three dollar tier which will give you exclusive access to my monthly newsletter where I'll share my progress updates and resource highlights and you will also be getting content that goes beyond what I talk about in my videos for example for this particular video that you're watching right now you'll find a notion database with all of the resources I talk about in this video plus everything that didn't make the cut all of them will be categorized by type and skill and you'll have links to all of them in one place so you can always have access to them whenever you want and I will also be making supplementary content for my other videos that I will be releasing in the future the five dollar tier will give you access to everything that is included in the previous tier and a monthly q a podcast where I will be answering your questions about my language learning Journey plus I'll also be making posts with resource recommendations or reviews and other things that just don't make it to this channel apart from that nothing really changes I'll still be making these videos that you can watch for free but if you like to get access to more content from me the link to my patreon will be in the description I also made some posts available for free there so you can kind of see what type of content you can expect from me and if you guys have any ideas about other perks you would potentially like to see in the future please let me know in the comments now let's talk about grammar luckily one of the best resources for beginners that I have seen is completely free and it's this book called modern Greek grammar notes for absolute beginners the book is available both in PDF and ePub formats but I would suggest that you go for the Epub just because the book has links to external materials that do not work in the PDF plus and I didn't know that about epops but apparently they can also play audio so in the book you'll be able to click or press on some words and you will actually hear how those words are pronounced which I think is pretty cool another pair of grammar books that I have is all those gramatikis I've already mentioned it in one of my videos but the problem with these books according to me is that they are completely in Greek and if you're a beginner chances are you will not understand much and ironically I think by the time you get more advanced and you will be able to understand the explanations you probably will not need the book because a lot of the things that it talks about are very basic a full disclosure I got this book from the publisher and they did tell me that they're working on an English version of the book and I think that would be a much better option for a beginner but for now I'm just letting you know that it is an option but I would definitely recommend the modern great grammar notes for absolute beginners that I just mentioned a couple of minutes ago now let's look at the apps available to Greek Learners I personally think apps can be great for when you're dabbling in a language or if you're just starting and you want to learn some Basics including the alphabet before moving on to something like a book unfortunately when it comes to Greek there's not a lot of options to choose from but some of the apps that do offer Greek are Duolingo mango languages drops monthly link and clothes master and I haven't used all of them but I have tried most and I eventually settled on Duolingo for kind of getting a grasp of the basics mostly because I had a premium subscription at that time to be honest with you I'm not the biggest fan of Duolingo because I find their content to be very repetitive but it does have some merits namely it's free and I think in the beginning they also explicitly teach you the letters of the Greek alphabet which in the beginning can be triggered to remember my favorite app however would probably be closed Master clothes Master teaches you vocabulary by showing you sentences where one word is missing and you have to fill that Gap the choice of sentences might seem random because I've seen things like the food in prison was better but believe it or not they actually use the most commonly used words of a language the biggest drawback to close Master however is that it is not for complete beginners I've tried using it right after I started Greek it was way too hard card I tried after reaching 100 hours of studying still pretty challenging but now that I'm closer to 200 hours it's finally starting to feel like the level is right for me but once you reach that level where you can use it closed Master does literal Miracles I've expanded my Italian vocabulary so much with it in just a matter of a couple of months and now that I've been using it for Greek consistently for almost a month a little bit less I already feel like I understand so much more in the Greek show that I have been watching and by the way we'll talk about shows a little bit later so yeah I will never stop recommending close Master to people who want to expand their knowledge of vocabulary without having to make their own flashcards another favorite of mine is link I use Link to read graded readers short stories and articles in Greek but you can also watch videos here and listen to podcasts while following the transcript the reason why I like link so much for Greek specifically is because there's not a lot of beginner friendly media in Greek and most things that I find are way above my level but link allows you to instantly look up words as you're reading and that is super helpful because looking up every single word that I do not know manually would just take forever this video is not sponsored by them but you can get a discount if you want I will leave my code Down Below in the description graded readers my favorite part there's not a lot of options for graded readers unfortunately but luckily we do have some deltos the publisher behind communicate in Greek makes great readers divided into five levels of difficulty most of them are Mysteries or crime stories but there's also a series about Greek mythology and if you're familiar with Greek mythology it might actually be easier to read that than to read an unfamiliar story even though it's set in Modern Times And probably uses more relevant vocabulary you can purchase the readers both in digital and physical formats and they also have audio which you can download completely for free on the Publisher's website and since even the first level of those graded readers was quite difficult for me what I also did is look for shorter texts that I could read in Greek I'm not a fan of reading children's books but I couldn't find other options for beginners online so I actually used a couple of websites where you can download materials for Greek children like Textbooks For example obviously they were written for children so they're easier than those for adults but since they're textbooks you can still will find something interesting and learn about things like mythology history art science and so on there's also a couple of websites where you can find free books and audiobooks in Greek although most of them were written for native speakers but even then you can find children's books here too or you can just bookmark the website and wait until your Greek becomes a little bit more advanced which is for the most part what I'm doing as far as YouTube goes I haven't been using it all that much for Greek but there's a couple of channels I keep going back to pretty consistently the first one is called lingua tree Yuli the host of the channel is a teacher of Greek and she mostly makes comprehensible input videos so videos where she talks about things in very slow Greek for most of her videos there's also subtitles in Greek English and I think some other languages too but I'm not 100 sure another great channel is do you speak Greek this channel has a ton of videos about grammar and vocabulary videos for listening practice Vlogs and so much more and of course there's the easy Greek Channel although I personally don't really consider it to be all that easy but it's a great resource to learn more about the Greek culture talking about podcasts I feel like there's very few options for beginners and a lot more once you get to the intermediate level I personally occasionally listen to this podcast called let's talk Greek which is basically Two Hosts playing out different situations like buying something at a store or renting a car they also have transcripts available for free in the description to each of the episodes another podcast I like is we Greek although it is much hotter than the previous one and here you'll get news in slow Greek with English translation and a lot of repetition another beginner podcast is called unlocking Greek potential this is not really a comprehensible input podcast instead it teaches you grammar and vocabulary explicitly which to be honest I'm not the biggest fan of but it can be useful sometimes and again personally I'm not at a level where I can listen to in intermediate or advanced level podcasts but I'll leave them on the screen so you guys can check them out and finally let me tell you a little bit about where I look for Native shows articles and podcasts I don't have Netflix right now but when I did I don't really remember seeing much content in Greek there besides the now Super Famous show called Maestro so for video content I pretty much exclusively rely on Netflix this is a website where you can watch hours of series movies and documentaries in Greek completely for free unfortunately only some of the shows will have Greek subtitles and even fewer will have English subtitles but there's still a good amount of stuff that you can watch here as a beginner and by the way I will also link shows with English subtitles that I found on Netflix in that resource collection on my patreon there's also an Instagram page called greek.db that tells you which non-greek movies have been dubbed in Greek and which platforms you can find them on and as far as articles go I am not able to read that many yet but when I do read something it's usually from this website here you'll find articles on dozens of different topics plus they also produce a lot of podcasts about things like True Crime literature music science wellness and so on in this video I've mostly talked about the resources that I personally use but you will also find a lot more resources in that little database I've made that you can find on my patreon as always thank you so much for watching this video guys and I will see you in my next one bye bye foreign [Music]