[B-Greek] hi everyone

Sam Robb bgreek at oneparticularharbor.net
Wed Aug 17 02:30:59 EDT 2005


On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 23:21 -0500, x wrote:
> Sam Robb wrote:
> >>Beginner Books:
> >>One book that seems to be very popular is "Basics of Biblical Greek 
> >>Grammar" by William D. Mounce.
> > 
> > 
> > This is the text we used for first-year Greek.  It was a decent
> > textbook, but I have some doubts the usefulness of the 5-case
> > system it presents.  Once you get past introductory Greek, you
> > will need to understand the 8-case system - otherwise, a vast
> > amount of existing material will be confusing to you.  So why
> > learn two case systems when you could just learn one?
> > 
> 
> What would you recommend as a replacement on the first-year then?

You're asking the wrong person :-)  

I should be seeing my Greek teacher tomorrow, though - I'll ask him
if he has any recommendations on a possible replacement for Mounce,
or if he thinks that there was enough benefit to starting with 5-case
that the shift to 8-case later was worthwhile.

Thinking about it now, my experience was that the shift really wasn't
too much trouble.  In moving on from Mounce to Summers and D&M, I was
already expanding my understanding of other aspects of Greek grammar.
Given that, the "expansion" of the 5-case genitive and dative into
8-case genitive/ablative and dative/locative/instrumental was just
another, similar part of the learning process.

-Sam Robb




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