Modern Greek/LegacyLesson 1b

Vowels
Greek has five vowel sounds, all vowels are pronounced nearer the English long rather than short: Throughout this book, tables highlighted in this color have (or will eventually have) audio recordings to go with them.

As you can see from these examples, many letters in the Greek alphabet look like their counterparts in English. There are multiple spellings for some of these sounds:

Consonants
The following letters sound like the English letters they resemble:

Note: If you're a native English speaker, try to pronounce a plain τ, that is without the "h" sound in the end.

Reading practice:

Most greek words have a stressed syllable which in words of more than one syllable is shown with an accent over the stressed vowel.

Vocabulary:

The following Greek consonants sound like familiar sounds from English, but look different from their English counterparts: The letter sigma, σ, is written as  ς at the end of a word. Some Greek speakers pronounce the sigma sound so that it sounds half-way between s and sh.

Vocabulary and reading practice:

The following Greek consonants have sounds not found in English:

Vocabulary and reading practice:

The following combinations of letters have sounds that have to be learned:

Vocabulary and reading practice:

One of the big obstacles for an English speaker trying to learn Greek is that so few common usage words are related to English ones (although an estimated 10% to 20% of the total English vocabulary has Greek roots, most of it though of scientific/technical nature). However, sometimes there is a relationship that would help you to remember the Greek word, but the relationship isn't obvious, as with ευχαριστώ and Eucharist. When this happens, we'll note it as in the example above, with ~. This may mean that the English word is derived from the Greek one, or merely that both the English word and the Greek one come from a common root.

Names of the letters: