[B-Greek] Re: Mounce's Books
Cal Redmond
kuyacal at earthlink.net
Thu Dec 11 09:18:53 EST 2003
Carl W. Conrad wrote:
> At 10:37 PM +0800 12/10/03, Oscar P Villa wrote:
>
>> 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:
>>
>
> Carl Conrad wrote:
It's not that it's dangerous; rather,in my opinion, this is a way
to assure that one will never really learn Greek.
While I share Carl's view in many ways (and always respect it!), in
April and May of this year I taught Oscar Villa and three other bright,
motivated students in Manila who had learned the "tools" approach to
begin to read Greek. My preference would be to teach such students in a
traditional manner, but nonetheless I found that because I did not have
to spend as much time explaining the concepts of Greek (case, verb
tense, voice, mood, etc.), I was able to teach them to recognize the
forms fairly rapidly. In about 15 two-hour class segments, they learned
about as much as they would have known in an 8 to 10 week
"introductory/Baby Greek" class of the type many seminaries offer (and I
completed as a student). The motivational key was to demonstrate that
reliance on parsing guides and interlinears did not give the same
ability to understand and exegete a passage, and to demonstrate the many
similarities in verbal personal endings so that they did not feel that
every form was unique and needed to be memorized separately.
Cal Redmond, Ph. D.
Professor of New Testament
The International School of Theology-Asia
Manila, The Philippines
(In US for AY 2003-2004)
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