Greek is spoken by about 10-13 million people only (and take my word for it, many Greeks can't actually speak it but you can't tell, after all it is all Greek to you, right?)

Most Greeks learn a second language, (mostly English) because they NEED to, for obvious and well discussed reasons.

Since the public school infrastructure for foreign language teaching ranges from "practical joke" to "shitty", most pupils learn other languages through private schools. Takes about six years.

I learned English through this process, and tried to further my understanding by reading books. As a result, I am FAR better in reading/writing English than speaking it, although I can speak with a passable fluency. Fran has spoken to me on Skype, ask him about my terrible accent.

A problem I found is that many times i know what a written word means, even understand enough colloquialisms but can't pronounce it right, or soetimes don't know the correct pronunciation, or never actually heard the word spoken.

And the fun part...
It was easy enough for me to hold a conversation with a Scottish guy, (who of course made an effort to speak clearly for me) and with a five year old from Birmingham, so I thought I was the cat's pajamas.

But one day me and a friend (who has a knack for languages) heard a Greek girl speaking to a guy, three feet away from us. They were talking to each other for maybe 3 minutes, and we couldn't understand a word, nor we could "place" the language. It wasn't Francophone, not Cyrillic, nor Balkan, nor Spanish/Portuguese, no eastern, no Arabic... no Nordic language. We asked her in English where did the guy and she lived... and her answer was "New Zealand"


[This message has been edited by trident (edited 08-19-2009).]