[B-Greek] ? - please respond

Ron Fay roncfay at hotmail.com
Fri Dec 5 23:06:29 EST 2003


Let me offer some words of encouragement from my own studies:

I began my Greek career by trying to avoid Spanish.  In high school, I had 
taken a few years of French and did not really appreciate it that much.  It 
was fun, but it took away from my time for math and science, the real 
subjects in my mind.

Then I began my college career.  I was majoring in (you guessed it) math and 
science, looking to do Ph D work in an extremely obscure subject area.  
However, I still needed to get my language requirements out of the way.  So 
I decided to take Spanish during my sophomore year.  I showed up for the 
first day of class, read the syllabus, listened to the prof speak, and 
promptly dropped the class.

In my brilliance, I decided that learning a dead language would be less 
effort and would take less time away from my REAL academic pursuits.  Boy, 
was I wrong.

I began Classical Greek (yes, classical) my junior year.  We met 5 days a 
week, and nearly every day was spent cramming all of the information 
necessary into my skull.  Since I was a junior, I could not switch languages 
again, so I toughed it out.  My prof was a gnarled older man who had been 
teaching Greek for more thasn double the amount of time I had been alive at 
that point.  Needless to say, he knew his stuff.

I was struggling in the class, working incredibly hard just to pull a B and 
watching those around me get A's without too much effort.  The professor 
pulled me aside at the end of class about two weeks before the final.  I 
thought for sure he was going to tell me to drop the class or some such, but 
instead he encouraged me about sticking it out in Greek.

Well, I ended up falling in love with the language my second semester.  My 
senior year I took 6 courses in Greek and ended up with a major in it.  I 
then did an M Div spending most of my electives in NT studies and Koine 
Greek, and here I am today working on my Ph D in NT theology and exegesis.

Being discouraged is something many of us have faced, especially with 
language studies.  At this point in time, I have taught that introductory 
course and have seen the long faces of the students convinced that nothing 
practical will come from this.  I disagree, though.  The first year is about 
learning the language, the second year is about applying it.  Just as you 
have to learn to add and subtract before balancing the checkbook, so do you 
need to learn the language before you can truly apply it to the biblical 
text.

I hope you stay the course.

- Ron Fay
________________________________________________
Ron Fay
Ph. D. student and New Testament Fellow
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Deerfield, IL.
roncfay at hotmail.com

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