Learn Greek with Subtitled Greek Audiobooks

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PATROLOGOS project

About the project «Patrologos»

Dear students of the Greek language, 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, 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 interlinear translation into English and Spanish. The purpose of this extra effort is to give a tool to the students for increasing their comprehension of what they read and hear in Greek. In fact, our recommendation to our students is to repeatedly listen to the audiovisual paragraphs at least three times and from time to time to interrupt the narration, in order to permit themselves time to study the parallel translations of the words and phrases, and thus comprehend as much as possible from what they hear and read.

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 acquire knowledge of the culture that created the language. 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, 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 era!

During the time since 2020 when we started our project activities, we have already produced several Subtitled Greek Audiobooks and a student of the Greek language will find enough material to study. 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.

Thank you for helping us grow!

Project Patrologos