Do you actually need a Greek certificate for your residence permit?
Long-term residence asks for A2 Greek. Citizenship asks for B1. Both come with a history and civics component most people do not expect.
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Notes on two languages.
Grammar explained through the language you already speak, what Serbian and Greek quietly share, and what the exams actually ask of you.
Ellinomatheia levels explained, from A1 to C2
Ellinomatheia has six levels, and most candidates aim at whichever one a form told them to. Here is what each level is actually meant to prove.
Read it →The IMXA Serbian certificate, explained in English
If you searched for this in English, you likely found almost nothing. Here is what the IMXA Serbian certificate actually is, in plain terms.
Read it →Saint Sava on Mount Athos
Before he was the founder of the Serbian church, Sava was a teenage runaway in a Greek monastery. The years on Athos are the ones that made everything else possible.
Read it →Stathis, and the year that made him love Serbia
He kept putting things in my bag that I had not paid for. It took me weeks to notice it was only me, and one clumsy sentence in Greek to find out why.
Read it →The freddo cappuccino problem
Every Greek who moves to Serbia goes through the same five stages. This is a guide to the drink, and a recipe, so that at least one of you can end the cycle.
Read it →You already speak more Greek than you think
Serbian has been borrowing from Greek for over a thousand years. Some of it is obvious, some of it is hiding in words you would swear were Slavic.
Read it →Corfu, Vido, and why Serbs feel at home in Greece
Every Serbian family seems to have a Greek summer. Fewer know that the affection has a specific address: an island, a small rock off its coast, and the winter of 1916.
Read it →Seven cases sound worse than they are
Greek speakers arrive at Serbian expecting the cases to be the hard part. They are the familiar part — the trouble is elsewhere, and it is smaller than you think.
Read it →Coffee, two ways: the kafana and the kafeneío
Ordering coffee is the first real conversation most learners have. Get the register wrong and you sound like a tourist reading from a phrasebook.
Read it →False friends between Serbian and Greek
Orthodoxy, the Ottoman centuries and Balkan trade left both languages full of the same words. Some of them no longer mean the same thing.
Read it →Name days, slava, and turning up on the right afternoon
If you have married into a Serbian or a Greek family, this is the single custom most worth understanding early. Getting it wrong is memorable.
Read it →What the Ελληνομάθεια exam actually asks of you
Most people who fail this exam did not fail on vocabulary. They ran out of time, or answered a question that was not asked.
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