Les meilleures ressources pour apprendre le grec en 2026

Modern Greek is a "smaller-resource" language: the range on offer is far thinner than for Spanish or French, and not every resource is worth your time. Here is an honest selection of what actually works in 2026, with the strengths and the limits of each tool — ours included.

Duolingo: good for the habit, limited for grammar

Duolingo's Greek course has a genuine merit: it establishes a daily habit and gets you through the alphabet and a few hundred words painlessly. Its limits are just as real: grammatical explanation is almost non-existent, and Greek is an inflected language where understanding the case system is essential. Use it as a five-minute-a-day supplement, never as your main method.

Language Transfer: the best free starting point

The "Complete Greek" audio course from Language Transfer is a small marvel, and entirely free: 120 short lessons in which the teacher has you deduce the language rather than repeat it. You finally understand why Greek works the way it does — and since the course is taught in English, English speakers get it with no friction at all. The one gap: it works neither reading nor writing. Pair it with something written.

Textbook courses: Colloquial Greek, Teach Yourself, Assimil

For a book-and-audio backbone, Routledge's Colloquial Greek and Teach Yourself Complete Greek are the two standards for English speakers: graded dialogues, measured grammar notes and decent audio. Assimil's Greek course follows its usual intuitive method and rewards discipline (one lesson a day over several months). None of them will suit someone who wants systematic grammar tables, but any of them will carry you solidly to B1 in reading and listening.

YouTube and podcasts: the ear first

Several YouTube channels run by Greek teachers offer clear lessons and slow, subtitled Greek — look for "comprehensible input" formats aimed at A2 and above. On the podcast side, shows made for learners (slow dialogues, transcripts provided) are ideal for a commute. From B1 onwards, move gradually to authentic Greek podcasts: the jump in speed is brutal but it is what builds the ear.

Dictionaries: WordReference and Glosbe

WordReference offers a reliable Greek–English dictionary with inflected forms; Glosbe adds examples in context drawn from real texts. For the full conjugation of a verb — a real subject in Greek — specialist online conjugators remain indispensable. Avoid depending on machine translation alone: it flattens the distinctions of verbal aspect, which are central to Greek.

Tutors: one-to-one is what unblocks speaking

Nothing replaces conversation. Platforms such as Preply or iTalki give access to Greek and Cypriot tutors at reasonable rates; one 30-minute session a week is enough to unblock speaking. If you would rather work with a qualified teacher who also knows this course, grecfacile has its own tutor: Chrysanthi Sakka teaches Greek as a foreign language in Geneva and takes online one-to-one lessons at every level from A1 to Γ2. Local Hellenic communities and adult-education centres also run in-person classes — more expensive, but valuable for consistency and human contact.

grecfacile: a structured CEFR path

Here is where we place ourselves, transparently. grecfacile offers a complete path aligned to the CEFR levels, with explained grammar, thematic vocabulary and exercises: what Duolingo does not do, and what audio courses do not cover in writing. Level A1 is entirely free, and mock exams let you prepare for the official Greek certifications under conditions close to the real thing. What grecfacile does not replace: conversation with a native speaker and heavy exposure to authentic audio — hence the value of combining.

Comparison table

The best combination for an English-speaking beginner in 2026: a structured path as the backbone, Language Transfer for intuition, a little audio every day, and a tutor as soon as the basics are in place. A few tools used regularly beat a collection of apps opened once.