By Joseph Lo Bianco, President of the Pharos Alliance
Understanding but not speaking is a common experience of heritage language or background language communities. We grow up surrounded by English, and increasingly we only hear our heritage language in our parents’ or our grandparents’ homes.
People often describe understanding Greek as passive competency and speaking Greek as active competency. There is some sense to this, but it is also a limited perspective. Understanding requires a lot of mental and linguistic activity as well as just processing the ‘input’ we receive from others. When we receive other people’s messages and process them, we imagine we are not doing much.
By contrast we think that speaking Greek is an active competency, because the speaker generates the messages. This is broadly true but also misleading. You cannot process what someone has said to you passively, you still need to apply active knowledge to sort out the meaning. Understanding language requires us to actively think about what the speaker intended, what nuances, or attitudes are attached to the message. To make this more concrete, imagine Stavroula speaking to her 16-year-old son, Orestes.
Stavroula: Ορέστη, ήταν πολύ αγενές αυτό που έκανες. Δεν είναι σωστό να κοιτάς συνέχεια το τηλέφωνό σου στο σπίτι κάποιου άλλου. Kατάλαβα ότι η θεία Μαίρη ενοχλήθηκε. Είναι χειρότερο για τον παππού σου που απλά δεν καταλαβαίνει τι κάνεις. Είναι πολύ μεγάλος για αυτές τις τεχνολογίες και σε αυτόν φαίνεται ότι δεν έχεις καθόλου σεβασμό.
Orestes: Oh mum, don’t make SUCH A BIG DEAL about it. I just looked a couple of times, SHEESH, everyone does it. I’ve seen YOU check your iPhone heaps of times. Even Aunty Mary, when she’s helping παππού, she’s always checking things. It’s nothing about RESPECT.
For Orestes to understand what his mum said he had to process information and attitudes as well as language. His reply in English tells us that he understood perfectly that he was being chastised, and about family obligations, and appropriate behaviour expectations. He understood it well enough to push back, it’s clear he knows a lot of Greek. His understanding is deep (his behaviour a bit less). This is a bilingual dialogue, a mixed language communication reflecting our bilingual lives.
Comprehension and production feed each other, hearing and reading more Greek expands your vocabulary, grammar awareness and natural phrasing, and each time you successfully speak or write in Greek you confirm your sense of what is appropriate, reinforcing your comprehension, deepening your mastery and turning passive knowledge residing in your brain into an accessible language resource for spontaneous use.
Comprehension and production usually develop in what linguists call a ‘developmental order, meaning that most learners comprehend MORE than they actively produce. Language comprehension and language production are intimately tied together, interacting to build a full communication ability. In the developmental order active skills lag behind passive ones, it is like a pyramid, we can understand and decode more than we use, because we can work out in context what unfamiliar words might mean but we might not be able to spontaneously use those words ourselves. Below, I recommend some practical ways to build active use from passive knowledge, to move to speaking Greek from understanding it, as we want Orestes to do and as the question behind this Pharos Tip asks, these two concepts will help you design your own growth from comprehension to active use.
Shifting from passive to active
So, here are some practical tips and steps to bridge the gap between recognition and production and become an active language user. To unlock your inner fluent Greek speaker, the key is to interact and speak as much as possible, in real spontaneous situations.
1. Do it daily: Nominate a daily Speak Greek time. Pick a topic for a week and develop new words or expressions for it each day. Tell people who speak fluent Greek that you are on a mission of learning and growing and aim to track your progress, stay consistent, be systematic, and ‘check out the tech’.
2. Record Yourself: Self-recordings are a useful way to track and improve and build self-awareness. Make tapes or phone videos of yourself speaking, listen to these tapes, focus on pronunciation errors and correct yourself.
3. Find an interlocutor: This is a fancy way of saying find a native speaker. Ideally, it will be a real person but don’t dismiss the tech. There are many apps that provide avatars and AI tutors, and some connect you to native Greek speakers for real time conversations. The best apps offer realistic simulation, enjoyment, immediate correction and helpful feedback. If your interlocutor is not a real living human being then you shouldn’t worry about them judging you, and you can make improvements to pronunciation and vocabulary before you test your new language ability with a human. You can set up a small group for Greek conversation, best done weekly or more often if you can manage it, agree you will try to use Greek and only Greek.
4. Shadowing: This sounds sneaky but it isn’t really, shadowing technique is just a systematic way to listen and repeat. You select real time spontaneous Greek audio (a podcast is ideal, but it could be the highlights of a μητέρα όλων των μαχών on YouTube clip, etc), but it needs to have stop and play functionality. You play, stop, immediately repeat aloud, trying to reproduce what you heard in real time Greek, especially new phrases, pronunciation and rhythm. Record, replay, check. You can do this as practice for the chat session with your friends, or an online group with an AI assistant. Shadowing helps you improve understanding of normal paced talk and builds your own oral fluency
5. Core Phrases: In communication there are low frequency words and high frequency words. Online just now I checked the 20 most frequently used words in ordinary communication in Greece. The particle na is in first place, είμαι (I am) is 4th, που is11th, and so on. Do a simple search of the 10-20 most useful phrases for an area or topic that interests you and use that to build your active vocabulary.
Help from cyberspace and from physical space
You can use core phrases building and sentence building exercises to pick high frequency words in cooking, football, weather, politics, etc, then put these words into phrases and sentences, and memorise and practice them with app partners (AI tutors, as well as humans) to put all this into practice. There are even apps to help you select the core phrases and words that interest you the most. Look up Anki or Quizlet both of which help you retain and recall words/phrases.
The best thing to do however, is to find a conversation practice course. Many university and commercial providers offer discussion or conversation support, on a weekly basis usually, so you are guided in improving your conversation. The focus of these is not a formal long term teaching program, but small group or even individual Greek speaking sessions on everyday topics, with the point of helping you move towards regular use. It is important in conversation training to keep a positive attitude, to ask for correction when chatting with tutors or partners, so they know where you are aiming to reach. The 5 steps above are personal exercises and combined with a professional course, supplemented by apps and can bring dividends, even if only done 10 minutes per day.
The following online resources all include Greek, and resources that connect you with native Greek speakers for text, voice, or video chats. Most offer daily practice opportunities, guided conversation, AI and real human tutors. They aim to be immersive and move you from passive to active knowledge. I don’t endorse or promote any single app, you should investigate the vast array of options available online, one of them might be perfect for your needs. HILOKAL, TANDEM, HELLOTALK, TALKPAL, PREPLY, MONDLY, DUOLINGO, GREEKPOD101.
One example is TALKPAL which helps you with interactive and practical tools to speak in Greek, and supports you towards fluency. You can get instant feedback, identify what you need to improve and shift from understanding to using the language. Here’s the link to TALKPAL Greek.
Conclusion:
Let’s return to Stavroula and Orestes and see how they are getting along.
Stavroula: Ορέστη, την επόμενη εβδομάδα είναι η ονομαστική σου εορτή και είμαστε καλεσμένοι στο σπίτι της θείας Μαίρης για μεσημεριανό γεύμα. Φρόντισε να το εκτιμήσεις αυτό.
Orestes: Cool, it’ll be sweet. I love my ονομαστική γιορτή. Ω, ξέχασα να σου πω, κάνουμε προφορικά στο μάθημα των ελληνικών. And I found a cool Greek app on my phone.
*Joseph Lo Bianco is President of Pharos Alliance, and Professor Emeritus in Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne.
Do you have a question you would like the Pharos Alliance to answer, send your query to editor@foreignlanguage.com.au.
FULL PHAROS TIPS SERIES:
TIP 1: My child doesn’t want to go to Greek school. What can I do?
TIP 2: Help! After 7 years of Greek School, my child still doesn’t know the alphabet
TIP 3: How can I support my child’s Greek language learning at home?
TIP 4: I failed Greek as a kid, can I learn Greek as an adult?
TIP 5: How to make sure kids get language learning on their Greek holiday
TIP 6: I try to use Greek, but they always reply in English…
TIP 7: My partner doesn’t speak Greek – Can we still raise bilingual kids?
TIP 8: Are apps like Duolingo enough to learn Greek, or do we need a tutor?
