[B-Greek] William D. Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek

Raymond Regalado fwgk5942 at mb.infoweb.ne.jp
Wed Dec 3 10:55:45 EST 2003


On 2003.12.4, at 12:35  AM, Kenneth C. Vendler wrote:

> For Christmas this year, I am wanting to ask my fiance for a Greek 
> grammar so I will be able to learn how to identify all of the tenses, 
> moods, genders, declensions and so forth without having to consult a 
> parsing guide or ANLEX. I picked out Mounce's grammar based on many of 
> the Amazon.com reader reviews, but I wanted to get some feed back from 
> the people here on BGreek before I handed her my list.
>
> 1. What is your general opinion of Mounce's grammar (for those of you 
> familiar with it)

I have only recently started learning Koine Greek but perhaps I may be 
allowed to voice a humble opinion since I am teaching myself and have 
read Mounce's grammar and a couple of others as well.  I think 
generally speaking Mounce's pedagogical approach  is good in that he 
knows how to stimulate the (modern) student's interest and maintain 
motivation.  However, I have found the "straight to the point" approach 
of Machen (or Summers) more to my liking.  At any rate I ended up using 
Machen's grammar as my main text, then supplementing it with Mounce's 
(including the audio lectures in the CD that comes with BBG).  Anyway, 
I believe that if you get to studying Greek really seriously, you'll 
end up purchasing a few grammars and supplementing them with each other.

> 2. What grammar in your opinion best facilitates an efficient way of 
> learning the basic attributes of Greek nouns, verbs, adjectives, 
> particles, etc?

Machen gets straight to the point, so if you're "impatient", you might 
want Machen (or other books that have the same approach, e.g. Summers, 
though Summers uses an 8-case noun declension system instead of the 
5-case system used by Machen, Mounce, etc.).  I found Mounce a bit 
"wordy", but he assumes that his readers know less about English 
grammar (and also perhaps have less motivation!) than Machen does.  
Machen has more forms to memorize by rote, but Mounce seems to have 
more rules about forms to memorize, it seems to me.  In the end, it 
will all depend on you which approach and which grammar would appeal to 
you.  The essential grammar taught in these books are the same...

My Two Cents,

Raymond Regalado
Tokyo, Japan




More information about the B-Greek mailing list