Learning Greek in Cyprus: from the Alphabet to B1

Introduction

Friends and colleagues ask me about learning Greek every now and then, so let me write it all down properly here. In Cyprus there’s basically no need to know the language — English and Russian are more than enough. Locals are of course pleased that you’re learning their difficult language and respect the culture, they might give you a discount or a small gift, but in the vast majority of places people will happily talk to you in English without any friction.

Why learn Greek? My first steps

On the other hand: first, learning the language seems to be the only genuinely working way to get inside the culture and history of a country, and second, Cypriot citizenship requires passing Greek at A2 or B1. And self-improvement is still a thing! So from roughly May 2024 on, I studied Greek in various groups, formats, and with different teachers.

Before that I had poked at Duolingo for about half a year, but the alphabet was already familiar to me thanks to mathematics, and beyond it I somehow couldn’t make progress without classes. Real progress started with in-person lessons in a small group of 4-8 people, twice a week for an hour and a half, with Nikos, an experienced native-speaker teacher.

It was genuinely hard, but as skiers rightly say, “if it feels hard, you’re going uphill” — after a year of those classes I was at roughly A1+: I read slowly, syllable by syllable, recognized some very basic constructions, and could squeeze out individual words to get information across. With a bit of luck I could probably have scraped through A2 in May 2025, but I had no confidence at all, so I simply decided not to show up for the exam =)

Speeding up, and the exams

In 2025-2026, though, I started giving the language much more time: doing the homework regularly, digging up and listening to extra material myself, thinking about it. About six months before the May 2026 exam I moved to Olesya Boyko’s online group, focused on exam preparation. Formally that was already the start of B1, but in reality I was preparing for A2 — including working through past years’ papers at that level and training all four parts you have to pass: listening, reading comprehension, writing an essay, and speaking. In parallel, prompted by Natalia Kitaeva, I made the tough decision to sign up for the University of Cyprus summer intensive preparing for the B1 exam.

After that, events — and my Greek — moved fast. At the end of May / beginning of June 2026 I passed A2 successfully and confidently, ending up with an Excellent; the dialogue part I did together with a colleague (hi, Misha!).

The university parking lot on exam day in May — turns out plenty of people came to sit it

Five minutes before the A2 speaking part

Then in July came that intensive, after which it was honestly hard not to pass: B1 also went through confidently, 9 out of 10. The teacher was the wonderful professor Zorka Sljivancanin. Our group turned out to be strong and great too — everyone honestly sat through all the hours, and most went on to take the exam even though many already had a B1 certificate from the May session, whose results were announced on July 31 — exactly on the last day of the intensive =)

Our group on the day of the B1 exam

The line in the transcript: Διδασκαλία της Ελληνικής — B1, grade 9.0

Did AI help?

Naturally, I tried as hard as I could to make AI help me learn Greek efficiently and prepare for the exam. The original plan was to load a snapshot of what I know into Claude and ask for personalized advice on what to study next to reach B1 across all four parts faster. That plan failed completely — getting my actual knowledge into the AI was exactly the part that didn’t work, even though all the classes were online and I recorded them with automatic screenshots, plus the audio and all of the teacher’s slides.

Here’s what turned out to be most useful:

1. Discussing unclear moments and constructions with ChatGPT. Uploading my own texts for checking, individual words, doing parallel translations — the quality is very good.

2. Generating parallel songs in Greek and Russian, and then listening to them many, many times. Input: a list of 20-25 Greek words -> I ask Claude to generate the lyrics in both languages plus prompts for Suno, so that it comes out in the style of the band “Ruki Vverh”, for example, or rebetiko -> I paste that into Suno.ai and get two songs for free:

   • Πρόστιμο για τη ζωή
   • Штраф за жизнь

   With Greek songs specifically there’s another neat effect: since every word always carries a written stress mark, it’s easier for AI to voice those lyrics, and the result comes out really close to real human speech. Maybe it also helps that there are simply a lot of good-quality Greek songs on the internet.

3. A paid app for practicing speaking — talkpal.ai. It has dialogues on various topics and picture descriptions; I just talked to it from time to time. For Greek the quality is much better than plain ChatGPT voice mode.

4. Closer to the end of the intensive I vibe-coded a local web interface for spaced repetition of B1 vocabulary — dead simple flashcards with Russian and Greek words, where the Greek one you have to type yourself. That definitely works and helps with the essay, but in reality I only put words in during the last couple of weeks before the exam. I realized I could confidently write only about 10% of them — though of course you don’t need all of the B1 vocabulary for the exam (especially not to write from memory). A solid A2 vocabulary is enough, plus a small number of phrases and texts learned by heart so you can write them correctly and speak them quickly. In my case that was 5 texts of half a page each, and I learned them so thoroughly that I don’t think I’ll forget them for another six months =)

5. Not AI, but overall the best thing out there for a basic understanding of the structure and logic of Greek, in my opinion, is this playlist on the Language Transfer channel. It’s a project by Mihalis Eleftheriou, a Cypriot from Nicosia with his own method for learning languages. You can really feel that he knows how to explain a language to non-native speakers. I listened to the first 100 videos (out of 120) two or three times. After passing the exams I donated 100 euros to support the author and the release of new courses.

What’s next?

Right now I’ve of course cut the volume of my studying sharply and switched to other things, but I do plan to maintain my level: I try to speak Greek whenever I can, I go to a conversation club, and I listen to the songs left over from the intensive :) Together with my wife I’m also going to go through B1 again, so she can prepare for the exam.

And beyond that I’ll go on living with the pleasant feeling that a couple of years ago I couldn’t make out a single word of Greek, and now I turn on the radio in the car and can already understand quite a lot! Also, I can fly to Thessaloniki and ask for a free coffee.

Do share your own hacks for learning a foreign language in the comments!

Links

• Language Transfer, Complete Greek — playlist on YouTube
• Speaking practice: talkpal.ai
• The songs: Πρόστιμο για τη ζωή / Штраф за жизнь