[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
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