[B-Greek] William D. Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek
Doug Hoxworth
dhoxworth at charter.net
Wed Dec 3 13:46:08 EST 2003
here's my two cents:
i first learned using goetchius because the teacher had
used that in college. i honestly don't know how i learned
anything about greek with that one. it is terribly laid
out and finding what you want is like trying to find a
needle in a haystack. too much work for a first year
student. it is good though for a reference as it has much
discussion on linguistics and such. for that, it is good.
but most first year students probably won't even be able
to follow that portion of it. it is better suited for the
intermediate or above.
later on, i read through black's first year grammar on my
own and found it quite helpful. the nice thing about black
is that he lays out the info nicely and uses concise
tables and lists that make it easy to grasp. he also has
good discussion about linguistic issues. as eric said,
this is a very good supplement to a first year grammar
(though i wouldn't make this your primary grammar).
this year i set out to teach a first year class using
mounce's grammar. i cannot say enough good things about
it. i think he successfully combines the inductive and
deductive learning methods. the best feature of the work
is the layout. he has taken advanced stuff out of the text
and put it into footnotes. the footnotes are great. also
one thing that i think mounce is very successful at is
simplifying codification and memorization. the information
is very easy to find and understand. his grammar also
contains good info on morphology. i highly recommend this
work.
in regards to summers and machen, i've never been through
them but have read and/or looked at them. they look very
similar. but i think they are very abbreviated and not
laid out very well. i used summers a bit more to
supplement my teaching of mounce (along with black and
goetchius) and found it very lacking. the descriptions
left me asking for more and seemed to leave many holes.
things were described much more thoroughly by mounce.
also, summers teaches the eight case method (instead of
the five case).
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list