I started learning Greek as a relatively responsible 18-year-old, on my own initiative.
The starting point for me personally was everything Greek, above all Greek mythology and history, that I was passionate about. That’s why I believe that teaching Greek, whether to foreigners or to kids of the third and fourth-generation in the diaspora, is least about language.
It’s about what they can relate to, or fall in love with. Be it history, philosophy, Greek islands, food, tradition, or their pappou’s horio. I can’t think of a person whose fascination with one’s language isn’t replicated with one’s culture or parts of it.
Being multilingual appealed to me. Being able to speak Greek, to this day, makes me proud whenever I say it.
Through travelling, I witnessed and realised that without speaking a people’s language, you can’t truly understand their culture; a language is the mirror of one’s culture.
How I learned Greek is simple – by speaking Greek.
In my case, setting priorities was crucial. My only priority at the time was to be able to study journalism in Greek after only one school year of learning it. Someone else’s priority can be learning to order a meal in a Greek taverna. Or, to speak fluently enough so when you visit your pappou’s horio, you don’t embarrass the whole family.
No matter what the priority and focus is, it does the magic when learning a new language. Then you continue setting new aims – I wanted good grades, then I wanted to write a good journalistic piece, in Greek – and the language keeps building.
Currently, I am at the stage when it feels frustrating that, while speaking Serbian and English at home, doing my job in English and talking in Greek to my colleagues, I feel that I am not contributing enough to the treasure I have already built. The journey to multilingualism is the continuous building and upgrading of knowledge, an eternal process, a never-ending trip.
In this regard, I always remember a local manavi from Thessaloniki market. Once, while discussing my knowledge of Greek and in an attempt to comfort me, he told me: ‘Don’t worry, none of us know Greek. We simply know how to use it.’
At the end of my stay in Greece, and still today, I know that it was speaking and loving the Greek language that made me feel Greece was like home. And that’s what it is all about, with Greek or any other language – ‘you are at home anywhere’ (Edward De Wall).
Unless your degree is in languages, a language is not an academic topic that you can pass or fail. It’s totally OK not to know, as long as you try again.