Grammatical tangles and pronunciation pitfalls
by Christopher Deliso

      Sometimes the most memorable lessons come from the worst mistakes. Teachers the world over can attest to the untold hours of mirth that arise from the preposterous mistakes foreign students, especially beginners, are prone to making. Provided the student is not made to feel too embarrassed, a little laughter can go a long way towards making a point. This is especially true in voluble, lighthearted Greece.

Teaching in Greece- both a rewarding and an exhausting endeavor- can be made easier for you if you're aware beforehand of some of the common difficulties Greek students encounter in grasping the English language. These difficulties range from the relatively simple matter of pronunciation, to the more profound grammatical problems caused by a cultural difference in the way language is perceived.

This brief summary of common errors Greeks make, therefore, may prove helpful not only for your future Greek students, but also for you, should you ever wish to learn Greek. Indeed, teaching your own language to foreigners is one of the best ways of beginning to learn theirs.

In language as in so many other things, Greeks can be argumentative and arrogant, believing that they already know everything, and so don't need any instruction.  They can be impatient and uninspired to do their homework; yet in such a beautiful, sun-blessed country, how could you blame them? Further, their natural quickness and access to American movies and music often equips them with an impressive amount of slang, which can mask their often shaky knowledge of English grammar.

It is a bizarre incongruity to hear a Greek teenager bust out a flawless line of West-coast gangsta rap, and then make some banal grammatical error in more mundane conversation. A few examples from the areas of punctuation, pronunciation and grammar may help you to be prepared.

Every language has its own phrasing patterns, and in Greek, the placement of commas often differs from in English. The punctuation snafus begin when Greek students simply transpose their own phrasings to English. The most common error occurs in writing, when a student places a comma immediately after the subject, possibly coming out with something like, "the cat, likes to drink milk."

This is most often caused by the student's desire to highlight the subject of the sentence, as a comma in Greek would do. This mistake is easily pointed out yet surprisingly persistent, and invites larger problems in the heady and tortuous world of defining and non-defining relative clauses, where indeed so much depends on the correct usage of the humble comma.

The most obvious problem native Greek speakers face, yet the hardest to correct, is that which lies in their very mouths: pronunciation. The Greek language has a few sounds that English doesn't possess, and vice versa. Greeks have trouble with the "ch" and "djuh" sounds, and, especially, with the short 'i' (as in 'thin'). This is because their language is lacking in these sounds, and so it is very hard for Greeks to say them correctly.

And this is not something that is necessarily improved over time, either; I know a Greek man who has been living in the U.S. for forty-three years, and working at a high level in English. He speaks and writes English every day, and has done so for years. Recently he invited me to a restaurant near his house. The restaurant's name, as he said it, was "The eeckery-peet". And so I drove along, dubiously looking for "The eeckery-peet". To my relieved amusement (for I was hungry) I found, just around the corner, the "Hickory Pit Restaurant."

This just goes to show how hard it is for Greeks of all ages to say the short 'i' sound. You might need to be vigilant with them about this. In my classes in Greece, I quickly learned that my name would be not only pronounced "crease" but "Meestir Chrees." Here is yet another stumbling block brought on by a difference between Greek and English. In the former, it is customary to say "kurios" ("mister") with a first name. I tried to explain to my students that "Mr. Chris" just doesn't work in English. Then they decided they'd just call me 'Mister'. When I explained that it was impolite to use this word on its own, and that they were better off using 'sir', they latched on to 'Sir Christopher.' I tried to explain that I was not a British knight; but it did have a nice ring to it, and they kept it.

Grammar presents the most complicated and perhaps most fascinating grounds for student error. This is a particularly interesting area because it shows the different mindsets at work in the conceptualization of language. Greek is a very logical and structured language, and so English can seem to be an utterly amorphous and chaotic one. Sometimes all you can do is to throw up your hands, sigh, and admit "English is crazy!", but on a couple points at least, some foreknowledge might help.

The first topic is articles. In Greek, a direct article usually goes with the noun, but indirect articles are often skipped. Thus getting a Greek student to understand the precise usage of articles in English, which is often just a matter of feel and sense even for us, can be tricky. A typical mistake of the Greek student might be, "I live in the Greece."

Articular modification of proper nouns seems bizarre to us, but is simply the done thing in the more logical Greek tongue. The lack of an indirect article in Greek comes up occasionally in situations where the student means to say 'a' but instead says 'one', or omits the article entirely, for example, "I have computer at home."

The greatest grammatical confusion has to be the use of the continuous tense. In Greek, the continuous is an entire conjugation of its own, and has distinct forms in the past, present and future. It is used to indicate something you are doing continuously, that is, on an every-day basis, or repeatedly for a certain time. The Greek student attempts to carry this over into English and says, innocently enough, "every Tuesday I am going for swimming" (note the preposition slip-up too).

Conversely, the student will use the simple tense when he means to use the continuous, for example "I go to the store" (instead of "I am going to the store"). These mistakes come up often enough that you should be well aware of them beforehand; perhaps this will keep you from reaching for your hip flask out of desperation.

As for prepositions, Greeks are endlessly creative in finding ways to upend the greater laws governing these unsung heroes of grammar. In some cases, like "I wait you", the underlying cause of the omission of the 'for' has less to do with prepositions per se. than with the lack of demarcated cases; had English retained more than a vestigial trace of its inflections, we might simply be able to say that the verb 'wait' takes the dative.

Similarly, Greeks often say 'of' when they mean to say 'from',
because both words are covered by the genitive case in Greek and the single preposition apo. Prepositions in phrasal verbs are the single greatest cause of trouble, and this, out of fairness to the Greeks, owes to a linguistic phenomenon that is rather illogical and can be grasped only by rote memorization.

This list of possible mistakes is not meant to intimidate; indeed, the fact that I can point them out so precisely indicates that the weak point, the Achilles' Heel, as it were, in the Greek student's comprehension of English is relatively localized. Greek students are very bright, usually quite advanced due to their immersion in American media, and provide an endless source of comic material. Now go ahead and learn 'em!

Christopher Deliso, a native of Massachusetts, received his B.A. in Philosophy and Greek (Hampshire College, 1997), and an M.Phil with distinction in Byzantine Studies (Oxford University, 1999). Over the past four years he has lived and worked in Ireland, England, Turkey and Greece. While at Oxford, he was the recipient of three travel and research grants for Byzantine sites in Italy, Greece and Turkey.

He speaks Greek, and maintains an interest in research on topics of Byzantine philosophy and intellectual culture. He was an English teacher in Istanbul for several months in 1999, and also in Crete, Greece, for the better part of the year 2000. Based in San Francisco, Christopher currently pursues travel and fiction writing, and is active in Greek-American affairs. He hopes that with any luck he will be back in the sunny Mediterranean again before too long!