This weekend I had my second session for studying Koine.  My tutor is very personable and we get along well.  Although my background is linguistics (specifically syntax and phonology),  this tutor’s teaching style is less “here’s a chart of declensions to learn” and more “let’s  talk in Greek about your family.”

We’re using the pronunciation values for modern Greek, which is closer to how Koine would have sounded than the ecclesiastical or Erasmian pronunciation schemes.

So far, I’m  enjoying it.  I haven’t  had a serious language project in some time, which is something I have missed. 

At these early days, there are two immediate issues.
1) I cannot predict Greek stress.  Like, not all.
2) The Greek question  mark is ” ; ” and not ” ? ” .

I’m used to having very good intuition for Slavic languages about stress, which is not helping and is in fact hurting my acquisition of Koine Greek.  Luckily, in most of the texts I have available, the stress is overtly marker with an acute accent mark.

For some reason the Greek question mark  throws me for a loop.  I’ll  get used to it in time, but as of know it interfers with the smoothness of my reading and writing.

I’m  really looking forward to being able to read our classic Stoics in the primary language.  I’ll  keep you updated on my progress!