Learn how to ask about possessions
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| Geia, legomai Chrissi. Hi everybody! I’m Chrissi. |
| Welcome to GreekPod101.com’s “Ελληνικά σε 3 λεπτά”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Greek. |
| In the last lesson, we learned how to talk about age using the verb eimai, “to be.” Another very useful verb, which is also an auxiliary verb, is echo, which means “I have”. As you can probably guess, echo can basically be used to talk about things you own. That will be the topic of this lesson. |
| Echeis autokinito? “Do you have a car?” |
| [slowly] Echeis autokinito? |
| Let’s take a closer look at this question. |
| Echeis is the second person form of "echo" “to have” Like with είμαι and with almost all Greek verbs, we have taken out the pronoun for "you" since it is understood. |
| Autokinito means “car”. In Greek, we don’t use the indefinite article in this situation. So the question is literally “Have car?” |
| So if you *do* have a car, how can you answer this question? |
| You just use the verb echo in the 1st person, which is eho. It’s simple, isn’t it? |
| So to put it all together, we go from the question Echeis autokinito? to the answer. |
| Echo autokinito. “I have a car.” |
| [slowly] Echo autokinito. |
| Or, more simply, echo |
| [slowly] Echo |
| So say for example, that a classmate wants to borrow a pen from you. He might ask, Echeis ena stilo? Which is “Do you have a pen?” Here, he used the indefinite article, ena – which is also the number “one” – and the word stilo which means “pen”. |
| If you only have a red pen, you can answer Echo ena kokkino stilo. “I have a red pen.” |
| Okay, so now let’s look at the FORMAL way to ask someone if he or she has something. |
| Instead of echeis, we will use the second person plural of the verb echo which is echete, meaning “you have”. For example... |
| Echete autokinito? “Do you have a car?” |
| [slowly] Echete autokinito? |
| Now it’s time for Chrissi’s Insights. |
| One very common usage of the verb echo is when asking the time. So when you are in Greece and want to ask someone what time it is, you can say Ti ora echeis? |
| [slowly] Ti ora echeis? |
| If you’re just asking someone on the street and you want to be polite, you should make the "you" pronoun "echeis" plural -- "echete". Ti ora echete? |
| [slowly] Ti ora echete? |
| In recent lessons, we have learned about the verbs eimai, “to be”, and echo, “to have”. |
| Next time we’ll learn how to use these two verbs in their negative forms to say “I’m not” and “I don’t have”. Did you know that to turn a verb into the negative form in Greek, you just have to add one little word? Do you know what this word is? |
| I'll be waiting for you with the answer in the next lesson! |
| Tha ta ksanapoume sto epomeno mathima! |
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