To be clear, my wife was born in the US, but her parents were not. She speaks Greek fluently and her family often speaks it among themselves. Recently, we've been travelling to the Zagori region in the North-West corner of Greece, right near the Albanian border. The Greek mountains are a bit of a hidden gem and I've fallen in love with them. My enthusiasm for going to Greece has eclipsed my wife's.

I'm also not one to take a promise lightly. Over a decade ago, my wife and I decided to get married. We both got married as full-fledged adults, so asking her parents' permission felt wrong. I did ask for their blessing though. In that conversation, I said I would do my best to learn Greek.

Greek, unfortunately, is a bit of a bear to learn. Their insistence on using a completely different alphabet doesn't help things. Like a lot of foreign languages, it is also lousy with genders and various conjugations.

I went really deep into Duolingo, but petered out. I've used Duolingo, Babel, and Rosetta Stone before to learn languages and I've found that with each of them, progress is quick in the beginning, then you hit a wall. At least, I do. I also find that I'm able to say things like "The pink elephant is in the hall", but unable to ask where the bathroom is.

Lately, I've switched over to an app called Language Transfer. I have to say, it's very good. It was originally built to teach Greek and Turkish, as a way to help unite a divided Cyprus. Since then, the app has expanded to include many more languages. The style of the lessons work really well with how I learn, so I'm leaning into it right now. What I like most is that it teaches you to think in Greek. It immediately has you making fairly complex sentences.

Since Language Transfer is an audio-only app, I plan to augment it with some reading material. It's surprisingly difficult to find good books that teach modern Greek. Most focus on Ancient Greek (which I'm also interested in). I picked up a copy of Complete Greek by Aristarhos Matsukas. Last time we were in Greece, we also picked up a bunch of early-reader books in Greek.

Lastly, I have one of the best resources, my wife. I can converse with a fluent Greek speaker.

I want to be conversational in Greek. I don't know how to measure this, but it might be fun to shoot for a B1 level on the Ellinomatheia, the only measure of proficiency recognized by Greece.