Fw: Learning Greek, how far

Dave Washburn dwashbur at nyx.net
Tue May 15 09:55:25 EDT 2001


> Message text written by "Ted Mann"
> >Personally, I don't see any particular value in learning to speak NT
> Greek,
> although I think memorizing biblical passages in Greek is of value.
> However, I would be interested in what other member of the list have to say
> about this.<
> 
> Well, how does this sound for someone who wanted to master Shakespeare, 
> to the point of learning the language?
> 
> "personally, I don't see any particular value in learning to speak
> Shakespearian
> English"
> 
A very good point.  Memorization is a big part of learning and 
interacting with both b-greek and b-hebrew, and the only way to do 
that effectively is for pronunciation to become second nature.  At 
the same time, I would tend to agree that learning biblical Greek 
well enough to construct the kinds of artificial, nonexistent clauses 
and phrases that we see in some older grammars may be less 
than profitable.  When I was learning Greek I decided to focus on 
what had actually been written down, learn to pronounce, read and 
recognize that well and try to gain a reading fluency both silently 
and aloud in order to cement the actual text in my mind.  In the 
Shakespearean example Randall gave, it's definitely important to 
learn how to recite the language properly with pronunciation, 
cadence, inflection and all the rest, but I don't know of any 
Shakespearean actor or critic today who works at constructing 
original dialogs in this form of English.  I wonder if this was what 
Ted meant by learning to "speak" NT Greek?

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"You just keep thinking, Butch.  That's what you're good at."




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