[B-Greek] Mounce's books

Eric Weiss eweiss at gte.net
Wed Dec 10 10:29:11 EST 2003


> Dear friends,
> 
> I have been looking into ways to equip others with a tools-based 
> (not- having-to-memorize-all-those-forms-because-you-can-look-it-up) 
> approach to Greek. I know, I know, a little learning is dangerous, 
> but I'll ask the following anyway:
>
> Have any of you looked through Mounce's "Greek for the Rest of Us"? 
> Would it provide a good, popular approach to Biblical Greek?
> Have any of you seen Mounce's English-Greek Interlinear?
> 
> I have heard the standard "it loses the Greek word order" but is 
> there anything else that may be wrong with it?

Bill Mounce was kind enough to send me a preview/draft copy of GFRU for a class I was teaching in "baby Greek" before his book was published. A friend and I reviewed it, made some comments, etc. It has some good points and not-so-good points, in our opinion. There are only two such books out there -- this, and Goodrick's DO IT YOURSELF HEBREW AND GREEK. One other book of this type is out of print, and another one that's forthcoming won't be published until next Spring.

I used a lot of the draft copy of GFRU in my class, and would probably still suggest that if a person wants to learn some Greek but can't or won't take a "real" Greek course, they would do fine with this book. They would probably also do well to use Goodrick's book.

On the other hand, as Bill Mounce knows, I am not sold on the idea of his "reverse Interlinear." It's great that it gives you an interlinear with parsing information with every word. In that sense it's like Friberg's ANALYTICAL GREEK NT, but with an English translation word-by-word with the Greek. But I personally consider the rearrangement of the Greek word order to correspond with the NIV interlinear text to be a bad idea. Word order is one of the most important elements for understanding the author's emphasis, and I hope Zondervan or someone someday creates a parsed interlinear that keeps the Greek word order. That would be a useful tool.

Also, I'm not sure how good diagramming the thought flow of an English translation is for helping people learn Greek, so the parts of GFRU that Dr. Mounce spends time on related to this might be less than useful. To diagram the thought-flow of the Greek you need, IMO, to know the Greek clause markers, and for that, Kendell Easley's USER-FRIENDLY GREEK might be better -- but it's for those who have already had 1 year of Greek.

FWIW, a few weeks ago, I found 2 copies of the reverse interlinear in one of those overstock/discount bookstores for $19.99, along with Verbrugge's 1-volume condensation of Colin Brown's NIDNTT, also for $19.99. I still didn't buy it, even at that price, because (1) I don't need an interlinear, and (2) the changing of the word order to correspond to the NIV text is too much of a downside for me to make it worth getting for the parsing information -- I can use Friberg's ANALYTICAL NT or Perschbacher's REFRESH YOUR GREEK instead -- and since I personally can't recommend it to others, I didn't even buy a cheap copy to have on hand to show my students. I'd rather they spend the time to learn enough about Greek words and verb forms to use an interlinear that keeps the word order.

Eric S. Weiss
eweiss at gte.net
http://home1.gte.net/vzn05pnm/index.htm




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