Learning the lingo

If you want to learn a foreign language, come to Greece. Not because it is easy, quite the opposite, as any taxi driver will quickly tell you. But because every time you stumble over a ‘Thank you’ or a ‘Two beers, please’, you will practically get a standing ovation from the amazed crowd. Greeks are full of admiration for anyone who masters their language because they themselves think it is very difficult. 

‘How many words do the English have for a stone?’ the taxi driver will ask, swivelling around in his seat so that he can look at you while he’s talking.

‘Umm…I don’t know,’ you will say, partly because you’ve never considered it but mostly because you want him to notice the oncoming lorry.

‘We have eight’, he will say triumphantly, veering sharply away from a tractor and almost into a ditch. ‘Stone, rock, rubble, pebble, gravel, shingle, boulder and flint,’ he’ll say, listing the words in Greek. The only word you will recognize is stone so it will sound pretty impressive.

‘We have a very rich vocabulary!’ he will continue ‘and very difficult grammar. Greek grammar is the most difficult in the world!’ he will end proudly, narrowly missing a pick-up truck full of farm labourers.

He’s right of course. The language is rich and the grammar is very complicated with all the endings of the verbs which have to suit the pronouns and then the adjectives have to change to match the nouns and the nouns have to change to match the prepositions. The way to learn is to blithely ignore all of that, learn a load of words and try to put them together according to what you hear. Greek friends who know how appalling my grammar is now might not agree with this method, but the alternative is to be like a friend of mine, who, having had an intensive and expensive course of instruction was, after a month, still only able to ask for a packet of cigarettes in a Greek accent; ‘Seelk Katt, please.’ 

I had some Greek lessons in the first few months along with the other native English teachers who had also come to Lamia to work in private schools; thin, bearded Alan, who Vasso said looked a bit like the biblical Lazarus, arising from the dead (she had a sharp tongue, didn’t she?), sweet Cecilia, named for a Catholic saint, Nick, permanently smiling and scribbling stories and Andy, who met and married a dark eyed, dark haired Greek girl and is still one of our dearest friends. We got together and persuaded Anna, for a small fee, to give us what we thought would be conversation classes in one of Vasso’s empty classrooms in the mornings. 

We had a book. I think it was the only book with Greek lessons for foreigners available on the market at that time. I wish I’d kept it. It was a gem. A thick paperback in shades of blue and black type with poorly drawn pen and ink drawings, it followed a system along the lines of the lesson plans as prescribed by Vasso and Despina. First we would read a passage aloud. Then we would answer comprehension questions, learn useful words and have a spelling test the following lesson.

Have you ever been back to a classroom for a lesson since you were a child? If you have, you might relate to us then. We became kids again, giggling in the back desks, all wanting to read at the same time, sulking if we weren’t chosen, sticking chewing gum under our chairs and finding imaginative excuses as to why we hadn’t done our homework. 

I can’t say that our lessons really reflected our needs. We wanted to know how to ask for a loaf of bread, where a train was going or to make polite conversation with friendly strangers. What we learnt was how to say ‘The young lady is wearing a fur coat’ and ‘The fisherman has a big net.’ After a few lessons we ganged up on well-meaning Anna and demanded to be taught a few more verbs and useful phrases. She said it was too soon for verbs and the classes collapsed soon after that. 

But with the encouragement of Thanasis and my trusty phrase book, I started to make myself understood. Of course there was the usual confusion over similar sounding words; asking for a shutter salad and closing the beetroots for example or swatting a cauliflower and ordering boiled mosquito. I won’t go into detail because you would have to know the Greek and you’d get bored, but if you are familiar with the language, you can probably work out the worrying occasion when I thought Thanasis had rung his sister demanding a hairdryer to be brought to him at eight promptly when in fact he was saying ‘Tell Laki (his brother) to come at eight o’clock this evening.’

The kids at school loved it when I came out with anything in Greek. There I would be, trying to get these nine year olds to produce convoluted third conditional sentences along the lines of ‘If it hadn’t rained, we wouldn’t have gone to the cinema’ then they would hand me a drawing, I would come out with my F Harry Stowe and they would clap and cheer and praise me. 

Of course it’s not just the language that you have to learn, it’s all the gestures too. My dad once went miles in the wrong direction on a bus because he mistook the driver’s ‘no’ shrug in response to his question ‘Does this bus go to Saint Luke’s church?’ for a yes. A curt no is an upwards nod, so you can see where he went wrong. He ended up at the power station. 

I think my favourite gesture is the one that accompanies the expression of mild dismay; ‘Po po po po’. Hold your arms out and wave both your hands around in circles and you’ll more or less have it. I’ve found that one to be particularly popular with nurses in state-run hospitals. They flail around over you like that while they are examining, for example, post-birth haemorrhoids. You’re saying, ‘So do you think they’re clearing up a bit, nurse?’ and they’re po po po-ing and windmilling away. Not very reassuring and you realize you’re in for a lot of ointment, but fun to watch. 

Then there are all the greeting and wishes. What do we have in English? We have an all-purpose Congratulations and we have Good Luck. We borrow Bon Voyage and Bon Appetit from the French and that’s about it, isn’t it? We don’t say Good Digestion to people after lunch, or ‘Go with the good and return with the good’ as they set off on journeys. We don’t wish pregnant women ‘ A good freeing’ as they come up to birth or say ‘May he/ she live for you’ to parents of new born children or newly married couples. People wishing me ‘Well may you forty’ came as a bit of a surprise to me after I had had my first child but it made sense when I realized that, traditionally, Greek women stay at home after birth nursing the baby for forty days. ‘With health’ is an all-purpose wish for clothes, shoes, hair cuts, school bags, anything new in fact. ‘May it be well-rooted’ is used for anything major such as a house or a business and ‘May it travel well’ for cars. We wish people Good night and Sweet dreams but the Greeks add a ‘Good Daybreak’. One of my favourites is ‘May you be of iron’, used to wish one strength. And there are other occasion-specific wishes; ‘Good studies’ for a student starting college, ‘Good career’ for one finishing and ‘Good service’ for a young man embarking on his obligatory military service. 

We have another lack in English. What do we use when we want to attract a stranger’s attention? I think we only have ‘Excuse me’ or possibly ‘Yoo hoo!’ at our disposal. Or ‘Oy!’ I suppose. I realized this omission when I was behind a man in an airport queue who dropped his wallet. He went marching off into the crowds and I was left trotting after him, waving his wallet and, because I had just got off a plane from Athens and was still in Greek mode, yelling ‘Sir! Sir!’ It sounds fine in Greek. I sounded like an idiot in English. Perhaps that’s why so many people think they’ve had personal belongings stolen in London. No-one knows how to call them back. 

People embrace each other a lot more here too. My dad always reeled a bit when Thanasis plonked a big kiss on both his cheeks. Thanasis always said that when he met my glamorous and pretty mum, that was when he was certain he wanted to marry me, thinking that I would turn out like that too. When I saw how his father hugged his mother I too was sure that I was on to a good thing. When I first met Penelope she was about fifty, short and round but Nikos, God rest his soul, was obviously still seeing her as if she was eighteen, short and curvy. 

The physical contact between people doesn’t stop at embraces. It extends to not wanting anyone to do anything by themselves. Wherever you go, whatever you do in Greece, you are seen as very odd indeed if you do it alone. When I left England it was still ever so slightly unusual to, say, go out for lunch by yourself. But you could certainly go shopping unaccompanied. You couldn’t here, not then, even if you tried. Thanasis would tell me that he had to be away that day for work and he would be back in the evening. I would say, ‘No problem, I’ll wander around the town a bit, do some shopping, go back to the flat and read a book.’ That would not happen. He would arrange for his sister to come to the shops with me, his mum to provide lunch and I would be welcome at the family home for a little rest in the afternoon. If I did take them up on their kind offers (and it was very hard to refuse) I would be surprised to find that nineteen year old Marianthi would give up her bed for my siesta and she would snuggle up with her mum on a slim divan.

I think many ‘mixed’ marriages (‘All marriages are mixed…’ said my caustic friend, Fiona, ‘…men and women,’) fail because the caring seems like smothering to the independent, foreign women. It was unusual for me, this amount of attention to my every need but it wasn’t oppressive. It was one of the ways people showed kindness and interest. But the main way that welcome was shown was through food.