[B-Greek] Beginner Struggling with Translating (Thank you, Dr. Mounce)

Peter Hamm peter at hamm-multimedia.com
Sun Dec 5 20:51:34 EST 2004


As another person who is going through the Mounce Grammar for the first
time, I wanted to comment on the comments that have been made, from a
beginner's perspective. Yes the warm-ups in each workbook section strart
with sentence fragments. But you have to start somewhere, and the student
who asked the question was on an early chapter. 

Yes, the answers to the workbook that were compiled by a TA of Mounce's are
sometimes challenging... But if you're gonna learn to read the Bible in
Greek, you probably should be challenged. I have derived quite a bit of
pleasure from knowing that I "caught" errors in his answers. (I emailed him
about one of them, and he respectfully responded and I am hopeful that it
will be fixed in a future issue.) It hasn't hurt my enjoyment of this book
one bit. 

A common criticism of the Mounce book is that it's so "incomplete" but if
you skip ahead to the very end of the text proper you will see that he URGES
the student to move on to a "full" grammar such as the (no doubt) excellent
Wallace book that several of you have mentioned. 

I looked at a couple of the other Greek Grammars and concluded that I would
never learn to read Greek on my own with them. I'm very thankful for Dr.
Mounce, he's provided a textbook that someone like me or these others on
this list can use with basically no background and learn to read the NT in
Greek. It's quite a thrill. (It's a money pit, what with all the expensive
reference books that I've now decided I HAVE to have, making my wife's eyes
roll every time a box arrives from amazon or christianbook.com, but a thrill
nonetheless...)

Remember, we're beginners, and sometimes we need to be treated like that,
which is what Dr. Mounce does very well. ;-) Thanks, you folks are all
fabulous!

Peter Hamm
Happily Struggling Greek Newbie





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