Greek Language Resources

I’ve been learning Modern Greek for the past few years. These are some good resources I’ve found. There isn’t as much out there about Greek as some other languages, so hopefully this page can be useful to other learners!

Dictionaries

English-Greek

The two best English-Greek dictionaries at the moment seem to be English Wiktionary and WordReference. WordReference is more complete, with more subtle senses and colloquial words. Wiktionary has gaps, and occasional mistakes, but the main reason I use it more is because of motî.

Greek-Greek

The Triantafyllidis Dictionary is the best online Greek dictionary I’ve found, and is my backup if WordReference fails.

The Babiniotis Dictionary (pdf, 43MB) is also good, available as a PDF, but harder to search online.

Translation Tools

DeepL is good for Greek, and often does better than Google Translate.

LLMs are obviously also pretty good now too, though even recently they sometimes surface ‘odd’ words instead of more idiomatic ones (possibly biases in the limited Greek training corpora?).

Books

It’s helpful to have a compact grammar reference. The best ones I have found are the Grammar Notes series by Maria Poulopoulou. The two books are freely available as PDFs:

• Modern Greek: Grammar Notes for Absolute Beginners
• Modern Greek: Grammar Notes for Intermediate Learners

The content is clear, humorous, and has lots of useful vocabulary and cultural excursions. They’re useful as a reference, but are also worth reading cover-to-cover for the commentary, examples and anecdotes.

Hilary Koll has a Learn Greek Doodle-Bonds book series and Facebook group, focusing on the meanings of etymological prefixes and stems. Greek words are often very etymologically transparent, and knowing the parts is useful for guessing the meanings of words, forming compound words, and helping with memorisation. The books are available to buy as PDFs, and there is a discount for the bundle. Learning these early-on with Anki made a massive difference!

Podcasts

The Hellenic American Union have a Greek learning podcast series produced in the early 2000s. It’s an old-school ‘situational dialogues’ show, with a narrator, and lots of pauses and repetition. It’s the most accessible / entry-level podcast I’ve find. The mp3s and PDF transcripts have gone missing from their website but can be found on the Wayback Machine. I’ve also combined them into a single archive (zip, 350MB) .

The Easy Greek podcast is good and plentiful, but the level is not that easy. At the very beginning I had more luck with Super Easy Greek for beginners.

Language Transfer was one I came across, but didn’t use so much—it assumes a very basic level (starting mostly in English) and is quite slow-going.

Also see my notes on smart podcast apps.

Video / TV

The Easy Greek YouTube channel is entertaining and is often interview-based, which exposes you to lots of difference voices and accents. It has Greek and English subtitles overlaid in the videos. My biggest complaint is that the English subtitles are so near the Greek ones that it is hard to not subconsciously read them!

Difficult Greek is a very funny channel with a more technical/etymological bent. Yorgos, the creator, combines a great sense of humour with a great knowledge of grammar. There’s a lot of other content on their website that I haven’t fully explored yet, including their own list of English-subtitled Greek-language YouTube channels: https://www.difficultgreek.com/greek-youtubechannels.

Glossonauts have some engaging, accessible videos about everyday life in Greece with English and Greek subtitles, similar to Easy Greek.

Akis Petretzikis is a Greek celebrity chef with lots of cooking and food-travel (Akis’ Food Tour) videos on his YouTube channels: one with Greek subtitles and another (subset) with English subtitles.

ERTFLIX is the online platform of ERT, the Greek national broadcaster. It’s free and accessible globally. There are lots of Greek-language documentaries with Greek subtitles.

Misc

https://moderngreekverbs.com/home.html is a very thorough conjugation website.

Other Lists of Resources

https://ikindalikelanguages.com/blog/herere-the-resources-to-learn-modern-greek/ mentions some good stuff, though the page dates from 2010 and many of the links have rotted.

There are also lots of posts on r/GREEK.