Money makes the world go round ...and round and round ad nauseam, apparently

by Me
(Crete)

I'm working my way through the Modern Greek Pimsleur, A&B. In principle it works well. I didn't start from scratch, I had quite a bit of Greek from many years ago, so it's a little hard to judge how effective it really is. But after doing the first 16 lessons I had an involuntary break for several weeks, and going back to lesson 15 I still remember a lot of it. So I suppose that means it's going into longterm memory.

But the tragedy is that the whole course is about money. Specifically, dollars. It's as if the course is directed entirely towards Americans who only want to know the language in order to badger foreigners about money and learn how to rip them off. I find it offensive and annoying. It's also irritatingly sexist, with attitudes from 30 years ago--the little Mrs. never has enough dollars and the Mr. complains tolerantly.

There are other things in the world besides dollars that you can use with counting words, I believe. How about--we don't have many sheep, but we have a lot of goats, for example, rather than the constant drilling of we don't have many Euros but we have lots of bucks. Once or twice, yes, but my husband has now got to lesson 28 or something and it is all STILL about dollaria and my wife. Sheesh, give it a rest. Is that really all Americans care about? Say it ain't so!

BYKI is pretty good for vocab, by the way, if you haven't discovered it, and it really gets things into long-term memory, but it's again not language specific and it doesn't deal with things like irregular verb tenses or plurals. You can make up your own vocab lists, though, so I'm hoping to do that for verb lists.