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

Eric Weiss eweiss at gte.net
Wed Dec 3 11:15:29 EST 2003


Some thoughts:

I learned with Mounce (1st edition). The new edition (2nd) gives you a second "track" whereby you can learn verbs along with nouns, instead of waiting until Chapter 16. It comes with a workbook with exercises and a CD-ROM to help you. It's a good grammar. Its big flaw, in my opinion, is it teaches you only about 330 words, not enough to pick up the NT after 1 year and read it decently. It will teach you word morphology, which is helpful at times.

I taught a group with Dobson's LEARN NEW TESTAMENT GREEK (2nd edition). It's learner-friendly and teaches you to read by practice, not by memorizing paradigms. But at the end of the class, my students hadn't really mastered reading the NT well. I would not recommend it.

David Alan Black's LEARN TO READ NT GREEK: EXPANDED EDITION is what my former Greek teacher at Criswell College (Roy Metts) is currently using, instead of Mounce, to teach 1st-year Greek. He likes it, though it's not perfect, but he finds structure and order and systematic presentation of the material is important, as Black's book (and most grammars) has, and he never liked Mounce's separation of learning verbs from nouns, as I recall. I think Black's book, as well as Dobson's, has a vocab of about 400+ words. Black includes some linguistics terms in his explanations which are helpful to know. It has exercises and answers. Whichever grammar you use, I think Black is a nice compact supplementary grammar to have because it's thin and has concise explanations of things that at times I felt he made clearer than Mounce (I read Black along with Mounce whenever I was having difficulty with an idea).

Both Mounce and Black use NT passages for their translation exercises, I believe.

I am currently nearly halfway through teaching a class at church using J. Lyle Story & Cullen I.K. Story GREEK TO ME. It's not as in-depth re: morphology as Mounce, but in 24 lessons/weeks it covers the same basic information that Mounce covers in 35, and the students learn about 630 words -- nearly every word that occurs 25x or more, and several that occur less than 25x (Mounce teaches every word that occurs 50x or more). It has picture flash cards that aid learning the 25-30 words each week, and now has a multimedia CD that really aids learning for those without a teacher. With this vocabulary, you can pick up a NT and make your way through major parts of it decently after a year, I think. My students are finding that Greek is very hard, though, as hard as I told them it would be, and an hour a day, 5 days a week, between our weekly class really is necessary. Story uses adapted NT/OT translations, so students can't subconsciously rely on their memorization of a verse to figure out the translation. Its weakness is its lack of practice examples after each section, but the CD has translation and parsing exercises to make up for what the book lacks.

I cannot comment on Summers or Machen or Goetschius or others, which I own and refer to at times, but have not taught or learned from. They may be fine, esp. if they include a workbook and an audio-video CD.

Ted Hildebrandt recently revised his Greek Tutor CD as MASTERING NT GREEK and it may be a way to study on your own. It includes a printable grammar similar to Machen, as well as grammatical aids, and is an interactive CD with audio and video -- like having a NT Greek tutor.

FYI, my comments about the grammars, as well as ISBN and ordering info, is on a Web page I created for my students. Of course, these are MY OPINIONS only -- your mileage may vary.

http://home1.gte.net/vzn05pnm/ntgreek/resources.htm

Good luck!!


Eric S. Weiss
eweiss at gte.net
http://home1.gte.net/vzn05pnm/index.htm




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