One of my resolutions for this year (and possibly next!) is to work through all the Teach Yourself books and pamphlets which line my shelf. Unlike certain fraudulent intellectuals, I feel guilty about having books on my shelf which I have not read, and I love doing grammar exercises (I recite declensions and conjugations as a concentration/anti-drowsiness tool). So I have made the above resolution, although I should note that I am exempting the phrasebooks, because they lack the exercises I find essential to learning a foreign language. If anyobody has lsuccessfully learned a language from a phrasebook, I would love to hear how you managed.
I did Malay last summer, and Washo this spring (check out the University of Chicago Washo Language Revival website here), and am now working on Modern Greek. It is my eternal shame that I, a Classical Languages major, have not yet been to Greece, and although I am more interested in the ancient than the modern, I can't talk to modern Greeks in Classical or Koine! The first adjustment, of course, was the abundance of "i" in Modern Greek; but if you actually scutinize the vowel system of Modern Greek without the overlying archaic orthography, it is a standard five vowel system. Greek has experienced similar analogical pressures and analytical tendencies as the Romance languages (or any system that is moving away from a highly developed system of conjugations and declensions), but its conjugations and declensions have weathered the process better than those of the Romance languages, at least Dhimotiki - Tsakonian dialect apparently has gone further down the analytical path.
One of the delights of learning a later version of a language when you have learned an earlier stage (and I do not wish to get into the language/different language argument) is the pleasant surprise of discovering that the unfamiliar word is familiar after all, a sort of diachronic déjà vu.The formation of the future of δουλεύω with a ψ was a little surprising, but made sense given the consonantal pronunciation of υ in former υ-second diphthongs. Even that knowledge did not prepare me to immediately recognize βρίσκω and βρήκα as descendants of Archimedes' bathtime revelation. In hindsight, this is what naturally would have happened to any verb that seemed to have an augment (ε is the the default) in the present, where no augment ought to be, and, in truth, the augment was less firmly attached in ancient poetry than in prose.
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