I’ve recently started learning Greek, to add to the list of languages I know, and I’m really enjoying it. I just wondered if anyone else here is learning this beautiful and interesting language too?
My Greek is very rusty, but it’s my go-to comparison for the level of difficulty presented by Welsh - - it’s not as weirdly, completely different in structure as something like a tonal language would be; it’s got the same sort of grammar as Romance languages, in a way, in that words have endings that help with sorting ut the grammar and syntax, but none of the endings are remotely familiar (other than that the ti/σου forms have an -s ending); but all the everyday vocabulary is almost totally unfamiliar, apart from eventual, occasional ‘aha!’ moments like centre-point-io = with–centring = to concentrate.
When I was first learning Welsh with SSiW there were a number of random Greek words that my brain would occasionally supply in place of their Welsh equivalents - - but, oddly, they were only ever Greek words that fitted Welsh phonology, as though my brain had sorted the words by sound, rather than by language. So there are certain Welsh sounds that don’t exist in Greek, and vice-versa - - there’s no way a word like ksana or ksilo could possibly be Welsh - - but there’s also a lot of overlap; so my brain kept telling me to say είχα (think uchaf, more or less) whenever I really needed to say oedd gen i 
I have sometimes wondered if I know enough Greek, thinking slowly, to translate the sentences for Level 1 or Bedtime Welsh into it, and so improve my fluency by getting the SSi-style orality and time-pressure in the mix. I suspect that I probably do, without major inaccuracies, but it’s only when you start to consider an SSi-style home-brew that you realise what a phenomenal amount of work goes into the proper course creation.
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Oh yes, I forgot to say: Greek is actually (one of) the reason(s) for me learning Welsh - I was using Duolingo to try to brush up my Greek, but finding it really annoying - the way that trivial differences of translation would mean you’d get marked wrong, even when you were right, and getting embroiled in a discussion with an American maintainer who was politely trying to explain to me that my English was grammatically incorrect because it didn’t conform to a USian stylistic preference - and so I wondered if it would be less annoying if I were doing a language where I knew less, and had more to learn. I looked at what they had on offer at the time, and Welsh was the only one that ticked the “Ooh, I’ve always wanted to learn X” box… and dyma ni.
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I’ve always hated Duolingo to be honest, and I don’t see the fascination with it at all. It’s another of those gamey/gimmicky language learning tools which isn’t very effective in my experience. I’ve never heard of anyone becoming fluent in a language by using Duolingo, yet masses of casual language learning flock to it, somehow deluding themselves into believing they’ll get fluent in a language by spending 5 minutes a day answering some multiple choice questions in a app on their phone while on their commute to work. They won’t.
But I digress…Greek is an amazing language, and I am aiming to get fluent in it of course.
I’m learning Greek too. My reading is much, much better than my speaking.
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