Reading Greek
Carl Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Dec 21 17:26:08 EST 2002
> Hi everyone:
> Several times I have heard or read the advice for beginners to read large sections of the Greek NT (or LXX I suppose) in order to become more comfortable with the Greek language. Do they mean to read passages whether you understand them or not? I am working my way through 1John, and am enjoying it. If I don't understand something, I look it up. This is going fine, but doing it this way is slow and it would be impossible to read large sections(unless I quit my job, which my wive and kids would object to).
No, you're doing it the right way, in my opinion; you certain MUST look up
the words you don't know and you need to have a pretty clear understanding
of the grammatical relationships as you read--and 1 John is easy enough
that one can read a good deal at one sitting. The key is to read more than
a sentence or a paragraph at a time--the more the better. The more you do
this, you build up a sense of recurrent constructions of the same sort and
also of the sorts of contexts in which the words that are frequently used
most commonly appear, and you should also develop, through the reading of
large chunks at a time, a sense of word-order, of recurrent patterns of
sentence-structure. All this increases your sense of ease and
comfort-level, and you should even find yourself thinking in terms of
Greek thought-patterns--or the sort of thought patterns that come
naturally to the Greek-speaker/writer's mind.
Carl W. Conrad, now writing from Tucson in the sunny soutwest
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
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