Keeping up on Greek

Ken Smith kens at 180solutions.com
Fri Apr 19 14:34:05 EDT 2002


Dunno about everyone else, but this is what worked for me.  After I got
out of seminary, I was pretty burned out on academics, and ended up
doing computer programming for the next 10 years or so.  Keeping up on
Greek (let alone progressing) wasn't a high priority, but I managed to
keep from losing it entirely just by doing a bit of reading every now
and then.  In the last three or four years, I've started doing a lot
more reading, including some outside the NT (I'm working my way through
1 Clement), and a fair bit in the LXX.  It helped that I originally took
two years of NT Greek during undergrad, so that by the time I finished
seminary, I'd been reading Greek pretty extensively for four years -- so
I'd had a lot more reinforcement than most seminary grads.

That difference showed up in my Hebrew.  I didn't take Hebrew until
seminary (and was forced to use an execrable textbook, LaSor's _Handbook
of Biblical Hebrew_), and it disappeared pretty quickly after I wasn't
reading it regularly anymore.  When it finally got to the point that I
couldn't remember the difference between a shin and a sin, I decided the
time had come to get back into it, and have been able to recover the
ability to read prose at least, though my abstract knowledge of forms
remains a bit weak.  (I can usually figure out roots with weak radicals,
but I can't always tell you why.)

These days, in addition to my full-time technology job, I'm teaching
Biblical intro part-time at Seattle Pacific University, so it's a little
easier to keep up on my languages (or at least, I've got a bit more
motivation, if less actual time).

Ken Smith 

> for another thread, i'd be interested to know how people not in
scholarly
> institutions (i.e. presently taking greek classes) keep up with their
> greek
> 
> Michael Hanel
> Concordia University
> Seward, NE



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