Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language (Routledge Comprehensive Grammars)

I have tried multiple texts to learn greek (Papaloizos v7 and 8, Dartmouth's MOdern Greek, and various other texts on Amazon, but have been frustrated by the extremely sparse explanations of grammar and how to put a sentence together. This grammar book is exactly what all the texts have been missing. As others have said, theres a lot of linguistic jargon, but the explanations are very clear, thorough and helpful. Its easy to skip the jargon and go back to it when you're ready for it. Its organized very well, starting with Part 1, extensive explanation of pronunciation, then on to the writing system, then Part 2- parts of speech and Part 3 how to form sentences, A chapter on verb phrases, 115 page chapter on noun phrases, another on adverb phrases and last on prepositional phrases . I especially appreciate the 40 page chapter on suffixes and prefixes to vastly expand your vocabulary, in Part 2. There are many clear examples, all of which are translated. Its an excellent book and im so glad to have finally found a goid comprehensive one.

The most comprehensive treatment of modern Greek grammar in English. This is a sound scholarly work. You can find discussion of every aspect of Modern Greek. The layout is rather classical: starting from morphology then syntax, just as any old classical language grammar will do. Patience will guide you through the careful, sometimes hair-splitting descriptions of declension patterns. The connection with Katharevousa, or the "learned language", is often stressed by the authors, sometimes to the chagrin of a bad ancient Greek student. The disadvantage of the book may be its extensive usage of philological and linguistic terminologies, e.g. oxytone, parasyllabic, etc. For ordinary learners that have little or no interest in the history of the language, I recommend Holton's Essential Greek Grammar, available also from Routledge.

I've only begun making my way through this grammar. But judging from a cursory review (not to mention everything I've read about it), it's superb. With apologies to the author(s) for 1-starring my review, I do so by way of caveat emptor to anyone who may be thinking of buying a hard copy: the one I received was almost certainly printed on demand. The quality is sub-par for a reference that will see great use, and for the very high cost of purchase. I'll be keeping my copy since the grammar itself is excellent, and because it's not clear to me there's any alternative, if one wishes to own the second edition, to purchasing it in this format. But I'm not expecting my copy to hold up well in the long run. Amazon and/or Routledge should make it clear, in their advertising, precisely what a buyer is getting. By all means, purchase this book if what you need is a comprehensive grammar of Modern Greek. You wouldn't do much worse, though, by photocopying whatever passages you need at a library and sticking them in a binder.

This is the grammar book to buy if you are serious about learning and using Greek. It is well written, well organized, and well printed. It is very easy to read and use initially to learn the rules and to use as a reference later when you just need one piece of information. Our entire class at the Defense Language Institute replaced our text with this book.

This grammar really contains EVERYTHING! Very practically planned and easy to read, easy to find what you are looking for. Highly recommended!

They serve as excellent reference books for me.

Fantastic! Meets my expectations! Doing my greek homework much easier now!

excellent

As noted by others here, this is perhaps not a grammar for beginners, but if your demotic Greek is, like mine (I like to believe!) pretty sound, yet far from perfect (whose is, even in Greece?!), you might find this book, as I do, almost fascinating enough to read from cover to cover! So many finer points I didn't know or hadn't realised. Very much recommended.

Kindle version still has MANY errors of the type highlighted by J Prentice back in 2013 - 8 years ago! For a new student this could be really harmful. This really should have been redigitised by now by Kindle.The print version is such an excellent and useful book, that it is regrettable for author and student alike that the untrustworthiness of the kindle version should detract from that.

The book is generally very good, but there appears to be a serious, systematic typographical error: numerous (but not all) instances of the stressed upsilon character ύ erroneously appear as a stressed eta character ή instead.This fault occurs across several sections of the e-book, but by way of example, Part 2, paragraph 2.1.1 "Nouns in -ας (Parisyllabic)" includes the words φήλακας, καήσωνας and πνεήμονας as supposed examples, whereas the correct Greek words are φύλακας, καύσωνας and πνεύμονας respectively. In total, there are too many instances of this error to list.In this type of book, accuracy is important. I hope the publisher will correct this error in future editions, and release an update for existing customers.

Beginners like me may regard this comprehensive and authoritative reference more as a university text book than a practical aid to start out learning modern Greek.Unless you have studied languages before, you will also need an English dictionary and a dictionary of grammar at hand - because of the extensive use of technical terms.Definitely not an easy introduction to the subject for first-timers, but no doubt a must-buy for advanced students.

Is comprehensive and very good. Recommenr to anyone wanting more than a holiday phrase book.