[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).



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