PATROLOGOS project

About the project «Patrologos»

Dear students of the Greek language, my name is Symeon Megalos and I am the creator of the project «Patrologos». The main activity of our project is the development of Subtitled Greek Audiobooks.

It is well known -and obvious- that Audiobooks are an important learning tool for practicing and improving the listening comprehension of the students. We firmly believe that the faster way for students to start speaking in a new language they are learning, is to listen to it, a lot. But there is a secret: They must always comprehend what they listen to. In this way, their mind keeps «recording» and acquiring new words and phrases, both written and verbal, and when a threshold amount of linguistic data is built up in their mind, then they start speaking by «replaying» these recordings in the right context.

In project Patrologos, we do not just create the classic Audiobooks. Along with the recordings of the selected books or texts, we also create their parallel aligned translations, at the phrase level, into English and Spanish. The purpose of this extra effort is to increase the comprehension of the students of what they read and hear in the Greek language. In fact, our recommendation to those who use our subtitled Greek audiobooks is to listen to the audiovisual paragraphs repeatedly and to interrupt the narration from time to time, in order to permit themselves time to study the parallel translations of the words and phrases, for the purpose of comprehending what they hear and read. They will find that, in a short time while using out material, they will begin to encounter the same words and phrases over and over again, and only then will they be convinced of the subconscious way in which this method of comprehensible input works in their minds. In other words, they will find that the various previously unknown to them words and phrases, they only have to look them up a couple of times in the parallel translation. After a few times they are able to remember their meaning in context, which means that they do not only aquire the meaning of the language elements but also the way to use them in the right context!

Of course, the students of a second language, should not limit their efforts in understanding the grammatical of syntactical structures of that language and acquiring vocabulary. Every human language is the most important product of an entire culture and so the students of a foreign language should also necessarily aquire knowledge of the culture that created the language they are interested in learning. And if this general truth applies to every human language, how much more should it apply to the Greek language and the ancient Greek culture that created and evolved it! Consequently, only the right selection of texts to be recorded in the context of our project, can serve this purpose, that is, the familiarization of the student with the cultural heritage of Greece, a country with a literary history of four thousand years which offers a huge variety of remarkable texts for studying. Texts can be used from the Homeric epics and the ancient Greek tragedies all the way to the divine works of the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Empire!

During the time since 2020 when we started our project activities, we have already produced several Subtitled Greek Audiobooks. Consequently, a student of the Greek language will find enough material within our website in order to begin studying. But our effort will not stop. We will continue selecting remarkable texts from the treasures of Greek literature and turning them into educational material for Greek language learning. The funding that we will soon start receiving from the subscriptions on this present website as well as from the sales of our Subtitled Greek Audiobooks in the format of Web Apps in the online Android markets, will surely help us a lot in achieving our development goals.

Finally, we invite you to contact us, both to share your impressions and questions about our educational material, and also to share with us your ideas for various improvements on our comprehensible reading method. Thank you for helping us grow. The Greek language, the language of Homer, of Ancient Greek Tragedy and, most importantly, the language of the Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ, deserves every glory, honor and effort for every human being to acquire it!

Patrologos project:
Greek Audiobooks with interlinear English subtitles. An excellent practice for the listening and reading comprehension of the Greek language learners.

Annual subscription cost: 17 Euro    

We would really love to have the luxury of ignoring the financial necessities of life and work intensely and exclusively for the production of the subtitled Greek audiobooks of our «Patrologos» project, and manage within a few years to develop the thousands of hours of audiovisual literature as educational material for Greek language learning, in accordance to our dream, and make it all available for free for the present and the future generations of humanity, and that in the future world to come, the Greek language and that Greek culture would -once again- be granted the place they deserve.

Unfortunately, reality isn't always that easy, so that with the push of a button our wishes to come true. The truth is that the production of subtitled audiobooks is a very costly process in terms of time required, if of course we want the final result to be qualitatively satisfactory. For the production of a single hour of bilingual audiovisual content, two or three weeks of work may be required, in order to scan, type, record, edit text and sound, translate, etc.

Volunteering could be a solution to the cost problem but -unfortunately- in the age of speed in which we live, volunteers are unwilling and unable to spend the time that the quality criteria of the «Patrologos» project require so that the final result is a really useful didactic material for learning the Greek language.

As a consequence of all the above, we are forced to request the economic support of the students who will use our material. We consider that an annual subscription of 17 euros is a symbolic price which may be enough to cover the costs of our next productions provided that the number of subscribers worldwide is high enough.

Therefore, all who decide to contribute financially to our effort, please go to our payments and donations page at paypal, that we use, and deposit the 17 euros there. Afterwards, let us know by email at symeon@patrologos.gr, and we will immediately register you in our list of members with full access for one year to the material on our website.

Thank you for helping us develop more subtitled Greek audiobooks and we wish that God gives you the will and the strength and the time to study them all!