Greek is a smart language to learn, particularly when studying science, medicine, philosophy, theology, history, political science, literature and theater. After all, the Greeks are the ones often credited with inventing mathematics, the arts, politics, physics and architecture.

If you decide to learn Greek, you'll find yourself in some pretty distinguished company-great thinkers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. And with the hospitable and lively reputation of the Greeks (not to mention that delicious food), you should really study Greek in Greece. But even if that's not possible, the language is still there, begging for your academic attention.

Important Past, Big Future
More than 15 million people speak Greek worldwide, and while it's obvious that most of them live in Greece, the language is also spoken by large groups in other countries:

• 578,000 speakers in Cyprus
• 459,000 speakers in the United States
• 314,000 speakers in Germany

Learning Greek can be difficult for English-speakers because of its symbol-heavy alphabet. There are 24 letters, or ph?n?mas, in the Greek alphabet, including five vowels and 20 consonants. But some of them look less like the letters you're reading now and more like triangles, parallel lines, the symbol for pi, an uppercase "I" with wings, etc. Once you get the hang of it, however, it's actually fairly simple - because those symbols represent so much, it makes it easier to follow. You'll actually think English is the hard language! And once you know Greek you will be more marketable in the workplace: being bilingual is a strong skill, but being able to say you speak Greek is pretty darn impressive!

Learning Greek Isn't a "Herculean Task"
Greek language study can help you out no matter what your major may be:

• Medical students will better understand all of that complicated terminology, much of which came from Greek
• Students of religion can read sacred texts the way they were meant to be read, in Koine, the version of Greek used to write the New Testament and the Septuagint
• Literature students will study the writers that gave the world epics, poetry and fairytales

If history, political science or Greek studies are your thing, studying Greek in Greece, home of Herodotus, the "father of history," would be a good move:

• Delve into the Hellenistic Period and the conquest of Alexander the Great
• Study the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, which ended democracy in Athens
• Learn about the return of democracy in Athens and the establishment of the court system during the Age of Pericles

English is Greek-Fed
The next time you watch Superman save "Metropolis" from his "nemesis" Lex Luther, you can thank Greece. Greek and English look and sound very different, but you may not realize all that the two languages share:

• 12 percent of the English vocabulary is derived from Greek-think "comedy," "sarcasm" and "thesis"
• Greek words have singular and plural forms, much like English words
• English prefixes like "poly," "auto" and "micro," while suffixes such as "-meter," "-phobia" and "-gram," come from Greek

At first, it's hard for some students to grasp that stressing particular letters in Greek words changes the entire meaning of the word. Greek digraphs, two-vowel or two-consonant letter combinations, may mess you up as well, because they represent a single speech sound that is not represented by a letter in the alphabet. But it truly is easy to get the hang of. After all, those Greeks knew what they were doing.