NEW YORK – An online program called Lexilogia developed by Dutch developmental psychologist Hester Hoette is now available to help people who want to their Greek language Skills.

Hoette spoke to TNH about Lexilogia, which a according to a release from  Panos Georgountzos, who handles marketing, is “now considered to be a unique tool that will prove instrumental in the preservation of the Greek language among the younger members of the Omogenia.”

Hoette emphasized that it is not a langue course for learning Greek from the beginning. The targets are children and adults who learned Greek at home from their parents and grandparents and attended afternoon schools.

An online tool, Lexilogia consists of three different courses starting with the first steps in reading and spelling and continuing to a level of complete proficiency. Students can follow the lessons without assistance and learn step by step through a playful interaction, to read and spell.

Hoette said the program is suitable for every age and level of proficiency, permitting everyone to improve their Greek. Only 10 minutes a day are enough to see results.

The structure of peoples’ Greek that has broken over time or was never properly constructed to begin with can be fixed by the program, Hoette said, through the words it presents which enable people to better recognize words and their forms and patterns.

“You then start using the words more easily and speaking more easily because they are no longer just sounds” the speaker knows the roots and what can be done with them which helps one pick up the meanings of other words, she said, adding “and you can put them in your library’s memory more easily.”

Hoette’s family vacationed in Greece since she was two years old and when she visited during her university years she realized she wanted to live there, attracted by the language  and the people. She eventually moved there, marrying a Greek man. Together they have two children.

Hoette had a practice in Athens for 17 treating reading and writing difficulties, and “Lexilogia is the result of decades of painstaking research into the decision making processes involved in reading and writing Greek words and the difficulties experienced by children and adults of Greek background,” TNH  was informed.

Comprehension of how the Greek language works is necessary for mastering it. “Whether you are learning your first language or a second, the phonological and the morphological processing is very important,” Hoette said.

She described what she identified as the critical steps in the process by illustrating how a pre-schooler learns, beginning with phonological awareness that there are sounds – and associated symbols – that can be put together to form  words.

She said the next step is especially important for the Greek language, morphological awareness – how words are words are built up from their roots with prefixes and suffixes and through  inflections – changes in the word endings.

The key is to recognize those elements.

Lexilogia can be accessed at: www.lexilogy.com/en