[B-Greek] William D. Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek
bertdehaan at gosympatico.ca
bertdehaan at gosympatico.ca
Thu Dec 4 19:47:50 EST 2003
"Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu> wrote on
: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 15:03:07 -0500
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.
Is the reason that you don't like this grammar much, due to the exegetical insights or are there other reasons as well?
I have become convinced (because of discussions on b-greek) that al least two excegetical insights have fallacies, but as for the grammar proper, I have really enjoyed it.
Once I started getting onto verbs I saw separating the verbs from nouns as an advantage. It allowed me to really get familiar with case endings before having to memorize personal endings of verbs. (Even then, I recall parsing a word like ELUON as acc. sing masc.)
Why is it so critical to learn verbs at the same time as nouns? After all, in order to learn verbs earlier something else has to give way; maybe 3rd decl. nouns or pronouns would have to wait till chapter 17.
Unlike you, I can't compare very many grammars because I have only three. The other two being "Homeric Greek, a book for beginners" by Pharr, and "Beginning Greek" by Paine.
I enjoy using them but I am not sure if I would have been able to learn Greek using either one of them as my first grammar.
Bert de Haan
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