Welcome to the Greek course!
Greek has a reputation for being impenetrable, and the reputation is mostly undeserved. The alphabet is twenty-four letters long, the spelling is far more regular than English, and the grammar rewards pattern-spotters.
Writing System
Modern Greek is written with one alphabet, but you will meet three things at once: letters, digraphs, and accents.
Letters are the building blocks. Each of the twenty-four has an uppercase and a lowercase form, and — unlike English — the sound of a letter almost never changes depending on the word it sits in.
Digraphs are two letters that team up to make one sound. They look unfamiliar at first, but there are only a handful of them, and you will have seen every one of them by the end of this unit.
Accents mark which syllable to stress. They are not decoration: move the accent and you can change the word entirely, so we introduce them from the very first lesson rather than saving them for later.
Letter Sounds
Below are the letters you will meet in this unit, grouped by the sound they make rather than by alphabetical order. A few more join in the next unit.