Learn modern Greek to conversational in eight months
This is modern Greek — the language spoken in Athens today, not the Greek of Homer and Plato. Eight months at 30 minutes a day plus weekly tutor time gets a determined adult past the new alphabet and the case system into real, halting conversations. Roughly 220 hours total. The script takes a week; the grammar takes the rest. You will not be fluent. You will be able to talk.
8 months · ~220 hours · hold a 15-minute conversation with a patient native speaker
1.Language Transfer — Complete Greek
One hundred and twenty audio lessons that build modern Greek from logic and the surprising number of words English already borrowed from it, not from memorization. Mihalis Eleftheriou — himself Greek-Cypriot — teaches an unseen student in real time and you answer aloud alongside her before she does. By the end you can build sentences across tenses and start feeling how the cases work. It's free, donation-supported, and the single best starting point that exists for the language. Learn the alphabet in your first week alongside it; it's only 24 letters and many you already half-know.
Free (donation-supported)
Language Transfer →2.Colloquial Greek — Niki Watts
Once Language Transfer has given you the spoken backbone, you need something on the page to nail down spelling, the case endings and a steadily growing vocabulary. Colloquial Greek (Routledge) is a full step-by-step beginner course built around dialogues, exercises and a clear answer key, with free downloadable native-speaker audio. Work through one unit a week, doing every exercise rather than just reading them. It turns the patterns you absorbed by ear into something you can also read and write.
~$50 paperback with free downloadable audio; cheaper used
Colloquial Greek →3.italki — community tutor
As soon as you've finished Language Transfer, book a community tutor for 30-minute conversation lessons twice a week. Community tutors are native speakers without formal credentials — exactly what you want for cheap, frequent talking practice. Tell them you only want to converse, that you'll bring topics, and that they should correct you mid-sentence. Book the same tutor every time so they learn your blind spots. Note that many Greek tutors also teach ancient Greek, so filter for modern Greek when you browse.
~$8–15/hour, pay per lesson
italki Greek tutors →If this doesn't fit you
If you want a pure reference rather than a course to march through — you already learn well from input and a tutor and just need somewhere to look things up — swap Colloquial Greek for Greek: An Essential Grammar by Holton, Mackridge and Philippaki-Warburton (Routledge, ~$45). It's the authoritative concise grammar of the modern language, organized for lookups rather than lessons. Keep italki as step three regardless — no book teaches you to speak.
Why this path
Most beginners overestimate the alphabet and underestimate the grammar — they spend a month proud of reading street signs, then stall on the cases and verb endings. The real bottleneck is internalizing how Greek inflects until it feels automatic, which takes input hours and speaking reps, not flashcards. Language Transfer builds the intuition faster than any textbook; Colloquial Greek anchors it on the page; italki forces production before fear of a wrong ending silences you. Book the first tutor lesson at month three whether you feel ready or not.