[B-Greek] William D. Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek
Nichael Cramer
nichael at sover.net
Wed Dec 3 17:35:24 EST 2003
Hi Ken
Yet one more opinion:
I am a great fan of Mounce's book, for a couple of very specific
reasons.
1] Mounce uses has a nice "inductive[*]" bent to his book that I
found very useful.
The net result of this is that I found that I was able --after
a pretty short time-- to read actual, real passages of NT Greek.
Because I am primarily self-taught, I found the reinforcement
that this yielded to be *very* helpful in keeping me on track.
2] Mounce's book on Morphology.
I have a dreadful memory. My major problem with learning languages
has always been the rote memorization of all those nit-picky
details.
Mounce's book took away a lot of the pain for me in this regard;
especially with verbs. Mounce helped me to understand that much
of what are called "irregular verbs" are really nothing of the sort.
Rather, the rules for their formation are just more complicated
than those usually presented. Once you understand those more general
rules, understand and learning those verbs becomes much simpler.
(Here, too, perhaps it was the "geek-appeal" of this sort of
work that I found so attractive.)
So, in short, how useful you'll find any grammar will depend a lot
on how you learn and your specific needs. But, for me, Mounce
was dead on.
Nichael
[* Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to learning a language.
Inductive, a "breadth-first" approach, in which you dive in and
start working with more complete sentences, etc, learning the details
of grammar etc as you progress. And Deductive, a "depth-first" approach
in which you build a firm, detailed foundation of grammar, etc, coming
to more complete structures at a later time.
As I say, in a very short time I found I could pick up a GreekNT and
actually had a good chance of understanding what was going on --although
there were clearly lots of details I was missing. I contrast this with
my high school Latin class where, after a couple of semesters I knew all
the declensions inside-out, but could only form sentences of the order
of the "The farmer's daughter loves the poet."]
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list