Keeping up with NT Greek after class
David R. Mills
dmills at mitec.net
Sat May 22 10:26:35 EDT 1999
For my personal reading of Greek, I have adapted some of the reading
strategies I teach in English as a second language classes.
1. Read at least a paragraph before consulting a dictionary.
2. Read without mentally glossing the text (reading aloud helps).
3. Highlight the words you don't understand.
4. When you finish the paragraph, return to the highlighted words choosing
the ones most critical to understanding the paragraph first.
5. Use context clues to guess the meaning. (If a verb, who does it to what
and in what way? If a noun, what does it do or what is done to it? Etc.
Also, watch for parallels, contrasts, sequences, etc.)
6. Look the word up in a lexicon.
7. Reexamine the context. Which clues were helpful? Which were not? Was
there a better clue?
8. Circle the clue(s) with the point of the highlighter and draw a thin
line from the highlighted word to the clue.
9. Reread the passage a day or two later using the marked clues to prompt
your memory for the meanings of the highlighted words.
By the way, I don't like to use a computer to read Greek because it is not
always easy to glance back several lines to where a word or related word
was used earlier in the context AND because it is too easy to rely on the
contents of the lexicon or parsing window.
David & Sharon Mills
dmills at mitec.net
http://www.mitec.net/~dmills
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