[B-Greek] Interlinear Greek-English NT
Eric Weiss
papaweiss1 at yahoo.com
Tue Dec 27 16:52:39 EST 2005
My suggestions:
1. Learn your vocabulary. If visual learning works for you and you have a decent recall of grammar after 20 years, I recommend The Greek Memory System picture vocabulary cards that go along with (but can be used separately from) Story's GREEK TO ME grammar. The cards cover almost all words that occur 25x or more (625 words or so, i.e., double the 313 or so words that occur 50x that Mounce teaches). 25x or more can get you through a fair amount of the easier books in the NT without having to use a lexicon. Of course, you should probably eventually try to learn all words that occur 10x or more, for which Metzger's slim Lexical Aids (Baker) is an inexpensive and very handy tool. Its word counts differ only slightly from Trenchard's more recent and accurate book (based on NA-26), and the words listed are the same, with Trenchard maybe including a couple more words in the 10x or more words.
2. If you don't have a decent recall of grammar, then I think it behooves you to regain your basic knowledge of Greek grammar before or while you are reading your Greek NT. Unfortunately there is no shortcut here, but Story's GREEK TO ME with its great audio-visual CD and the above visual vocabulary cards can make learning the basic grammar easier than many books, and in less time [e.g., 24 chapters (including the introduction) versus Mounce's 33 (chapters 1 and 2 of Mounce don't count, as they are just intro information]. I can email you info on acquiring this book.
3. IMO, rather than an interlinear, get a diglot - one that has the RSV on one page and the NA-27 on the facing page (American Bible Society), or the larger/bulkier but easy to read NET Bible version that has the NET translation on one page and the NA-27 on the facing page. It's less of a potential crutch than an Interlinear, and easier to read the Greek text, too.
4. If you can find a copy, Perschbacher's out of print (Moody) REFRESH YOUR GREEK presupposes a knowledge of all words that occur 50x or more (listed at the beginning of the book), and includes the entire GNT (UBS 3rd Corrected = NA-26/27), and tells you in what order to read the books to increase your vocabulary accordingly. It also has supplementary vocabularies at the beginning of each book, and gives translations as well as grammatical information for each word you do not yet know each time such a word occurs. It also has a 100+ page grammar and syntax summary in the back and additional helps. However, the text is Greek only, not an interlinear or diglot. Zondervan has A READER'S GREEK NEW TESTAMENT that defines for you every word that occurs less than 30x, but that means you'd first need to learn every word that occurs 30x or more. It, too, is Greek only. It's based on the reconstructed Greek text that underlies the NIV, with NA-27 readings listed where they
differ (Zondervan tried but failed to get permission to use the NA-27 text before having to go to print with this).
Good luck!
Eric S. Weiss
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