[B-Greek] Keeping up with Greek after the first year

spencerj76 at aol.com spencerj76 at aol.com
Tue Apr 5 11:03:40 EDT 2011



5 Apr 2011

Friends:

To keep up with Greek after the first year, I'd recommend choosing some stories, such as the Wedding at Cana, from the Gospel of John, or possibly working through portions of 1 John. I think of these NT books as having some of the easier Greek to read in the NT, followed by (in my experience) selections from the Gospel of Matthew. Parables are great for this--the story-line keeps one reading.

If one wants a readable grammar that a person could work through in a summer (or break) to supplement first-year Greek, then I'd recommend:

H. E. Dana and Julius R. Mantey, A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament (Macmillan, 1955)

Um, I know many list readers will find this resource a bit "long in the tooth," so to speak, having been published originally in 1927, but I've always found it very accessible, and a student of Greek can always supplement old-time grammatical knowledge with more contemporary resources later. I believe I worked through Dana and Mantey way back when, sometime after my own first year of Greek, and the volume has been helping me ever since. At about 300 pages of grammatical text, with pages measuring only 5" x 7.25" (about the size of a UBS NT), Dana and Mantey will give a student some help without more detail than a person really needs after the first year. I'm assuming, too, that "keeping up with Greek" that's been learned doesn't necessarily mean a full-throttle effort but something more along the lines of maintaining the skills one's attained until year two comes along.

Another possibility would be to use a word-frequency resource such as those developed by B. Metzger and others coupled with attainable goals to extend one's vocabulary beyond what's been attained in the first year.

Best wishes,
Jeremy Spencer





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