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

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Dec 3 15:03:07 EST 2003


At 10:35 AM -0500 12/3/03, 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)
>
>2. What grammar in your opinion best facilitates an efficient way of
>learning the basic attributes of Greek nouns, verbs, adjectives,
>particles, etc?

Several others have had a say-so on this and I am sure there will be
others; I just want to underline what may be obvious after reading several
of the replies: B-Greekers are unlikely to form a consensus about anything,
even beginning textbooks for Biblical Greek. Several like Mounce's work
very much; I've taught out of it myself and don't really much like it, but
it's certainly more useful if one has the workbook and if one starts
learning nouns and verbs at the same time. The grammatical explanations are
adequate; what turned me off personally was the "exegetical insights"
feature, which seems to me to confound a particular theological perspective
with points of grammatical analysis that are arguable and probably
premature for beginning students of Biblical Greek. Of course there are
many who find that feature particularly valuable: tastes differ. I've also
taught from Machen but I would never recommend it: its grammatical
explanations are simplistic and sometimes inadequate; worse than that is
the fact that many of the sentences in the made-up exercises, both the
Greek to English and English to Greek exercises, involve misused grammar
and idioms.

The best grammar for Beginning Koine that I've ever encountered is out of
print: it is Robert W. Funk's 3-volume set, _A Beginning-Intermediate
Grammar of Hellenistic Greek_; it's out of print, but I think one can get
used copies through Amazon and perhaps other sources.

Finally, I really don't think it's possible to learn ancient Greek
completely on one's own: one really needs to be able to put questions about
what one doesn't understand in a textbook to those who are in a position to
know. That's one function that I think we can perform well on B-Greek.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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