[B-Greek] Machen's NT Greek for Beginners
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Feb 18 08:09:15 EST 2004
At 7:07 AM -0500 2/18/04, Terry and Gail Cook wrote:
>O.K. Mr Conrad, thanks for the advice :) What books would you suggest
>instead of Machen and which online sources do you feel are suitable for a
>putz trying to learn NT Greek?
>Terry Cook
I really was NOT being facetious in my comments about Machen. I have taught
out of it myself and think I'm familiar enough with its qualities: its
grammatical explanations are too brief and for that reason less than fully
adequate or accurate; its sentences, both Greek-to-English and
English-to-Greek are "made-up" and many of them display bad grammar and
idiom (this is a pet peeve of mine; the best introductory grammars use
exclusively or almost exclusively texts drawn directly from ancient Greek
writers).
The best book is, unfortunately, long since out of print (Funk's
_Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek). Most B-Greekers seem
to like Mounce's _Basics of Biblical Greek_ with accompanying workbook. I
don't like it that much myself (and I have taught, over the course of 40
years of teaching, from Machen and from Mounce) but its grammatical
explanations are fuller and generally adequate and accurate. Better, I
think, is N. Clayton Croy's _A Primer of Biblical Greek_. Some list-members
have praised J. Lyle Story's _Greek to Me_. B-Greeker B. Ward Powers has a
textbook entitled _Learn to Read the Greek New Testament_. Then there are
several good web-based and CD-based courses in Biblical Greek, and I'll
show you some starting points.
You might look at Mark Goodacre's page, "Learning New Testament Greek" at
http://www.ntgateway.com/greek/learning.htm
An outstanding web resource entitled "Greek Grammar on the Web" lists
numerous textbooks for ancient Greek in many languages--including American
and English:
http://perswww.kuleuven.ac.be/~u0013314/greekg/courses.htm#english
Michael Palmer has an excellent site entitled "Greek Grammars and Other
Resources for Learning Ancient Greek" at
http://greek-language.com/learn.greek/
Finally, learning Biblical Greek is certainly not an easy undertaking; it
requires patience and diligence, time and effort. It's particularly
difficult to learn without help from a teacher or from others who know the
language. It's not as if there were only one satisfactory textbook for
teaching and learning Greek, but it is surely true that some books are
better than others; almost any other Biblical Greek textbook is better than
Machen.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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