Little Greek 101:
Verbs (present active indicative)

Verbs are the words that tell you what is happening. Here are some English verbs: see, smell, hit, walk, believe, grow, love, hate, rub, die, snort, laugh. In the following examples, the verbs that mean "to see" are shown in bold type:

John 1:29

John 1:29

Make sure you can pronounce the verse. You can click on the verse to hear me read it. Press [here]for some notes to help you understand the verse.

Matthew 22:16

Matthew 22:16

Make sure you can pronounce the verse. You can click on the verse to hear me read it. Press [here]for some notes to help you understand the verse.

Observe these verbs:Note that the Greek uses only one word, blepei, to say "he sees", and only one word, blepeiV, to say "you see". The endings for these verbs tell you who is doing the seeing, so there is no need to add the words "he" or "you". This is true to some extent for English as well; in the English translations: "he sees", but "you see". However, in English, many verb forms are the same: "I see", "you see", "we see", "they see", so the verb form "see" doesn't tell you whether "I", "you", or "we" is doing the seeing. Greek verbs have a unique ending for each, so you know exactly who is doing the seeing.

Words like "I", "we", "you", and "they" are called pronouns. Greek tends to leave out pronouns, since you already know who it is if you look at the verb. When a pronoun appears in Greek, the sentence is emphasizing who it is that is doing the action.

blepw

Here are the forms for the verb blepw:

Present active indicative endings for blepw

On the left hand, you see a Greek word, e.g. blepw. In the middle column, you see the English translation; the translation for blepwis "I see". The third column gives grammatical terms like "first person singular".

Here are some things you should make sure you understand:

Now I have some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is this: I've created a cute little flashcard toy which will help you learn these endings. And the bad news? If you don't use this flashcard toy, but go on to the next section without learning the endings, you'll be hopelessly lost. You won't know who is doing what. So please take the time to review these endings until you know them perfectly. With my flashcard gizmo, this will probably take 5-10 minutes.

How to use the Little Greek Flashcard Gizmo

The flashcard gizmo shows the Greek word on the left. Look at the word, and guess what it means, then hit the "Show" button to display the English meaning. If you are right, hit the "Right" button, if not, hit the "Wrong" button. Each choice will be presented 3 times, in a random sequence. When the gizmo is done displaying the cards, the left hand window goes blank - you can hit "Again" to start over. I suggest you keep hitting "Again" until you can get all the answers right.

Incidentally, the first few times through, you may need to refer to the above table. That's OK - just scroll up in your web browser. Of course, you should keep practicing until you can get these words right without looking at the table.

Now let's try it the other way around; this time, we will show you the English words, and you should translate it into Greek. Say the Greek words out loud:

Note:The. flashcards use English letters. If anybody knows how I can get a Java program to display these letters to display in Greek when running in a web browser, please send mail to the Little Greek (jwrobie@mindspring.com). The Java virtual machine doesn't like me to access your operating system to open a font. I know how to do it with GreekGIF, but I'm looking for another solution...

And now for a few more verbs...

At this point, I would like to drill you on some other verbs, but you don't know any other verbs yet. Never fear, the little Greek still has his flashcard gizmowaiting, and he will use it to teach you some of the most common verbs in the Greek New Testament:

legw, ecw, akouw, ginwskw, lambanw

OK, now let's practice these 5 verbs until you know them:

Got it so far? Now let's try translating English into Greek:

Now we want to use these verbs together with the endings we saw with "blepw". For instance, compare the forms for "blepw" with the forms for "legw", "I say":

blepw, legw

You can apply these endings in the same way to any one of the verbs you have learned so far. In fact, just to prove to you that this is true, I'm going to give you yet another opportunity to use our famous, patented flashcard gizmo!

And now we'll do it again, translating from English into Greek:


Real Bible texts

Up to now, this chapter has had only a few real texts from the Bible. In this section, we will present a Bible text that is missing one word, along with an interlinear translation that will help you identify the word. For each text, do the following:

  1. Write the text down on a piece of paper, adding the missing word. Remember to write accents, breathing marks, and iota subscripts!
  2. Read the entire text out loud. This is important, if you want to learn to think in Greek!
  3. Think about what the text might mean. This may be difficult for several of these passages. That's OK, this is only your second lesson.
  4. Look up the passage in one or more Bible translations. Does the verse make sense now?

John 9:35

Note that this is a question, and read it as such! Also, remember that the pronoun "you" emphasizes who it is who believes. The meaning of the whole is, "do youbelieve in the son of man?" Frequently, if a verb means "you believe" in a statement, a question with the same verb form will mean "do you believe?". Add the Greek word for "you believe", then read the sentence out loud several times, remembering that it is a question.

John 9:35

John 12:44

Add the Greek word for "he believes" and read this out loud several times.

John 12:44

ouis one of the "little words" you learned in the first lesson.

Matthew 11:4

Matthew 11:4

kaiis one of the "little words" you learned in the first lesson.

Luke 8:13

Luke 8:13

kaiis one of the "little words" you learned in the first lesson. oukis a form of ou, another one of your "little words". outoiis a form of outoV, which is also on your "little words" list. And do you recognize the word proV? It doesn't always mean "with"; in this case, it means "for".

John 5:41

John 5:41

The present tense can be used to describe something some one does habitually; for this example, we have used the gloss "I do accept" to mean "I am in the habit of accepting", which conveys the verb's meaning in this verse.

little word alert: ou.

Matt 9:28

Matthew 9:28

John 8:48

John 8:48

little word alert: ou, kai.

John 8:49

John 8:49

little word alert: oukis a form of ou.

Matt 26:65

Matthew 26:65

1 John 3:22

1 John 3:22

little word alert: kai.

Verbs ending in -ew

In this section, we will introduce some verbs which have slightly different endings from the ones we have discussed so far. Let's look at the endings for filew, which means "to love" or "to like":

filew

Except for the accents, which you can feel perfectly free to ignore at this point (as long as you stress accented syllables when you pronounce them!), only two of these forms are different from the ones we have seen so far, the forms for "we" and "you all":

blepw, filew

Let's get out our gizmoagain and practice these endings:

Now let's learn some more of these verbs:

kalew ktl

And now we'll do it again, translating from English into Greek:

Since the "we" and "you all" forms are the only forms that are new, let's practice those two endings for these new words. To help remember the differences between these forms and the ones we learned earlier, the next flashcard exercise includes both kinds of verbs.

Always remove the -ewbefore adding the endings! For instance, to say "we do", take the verb poiew, remove the -ewto produce poiew, then add -oumento get poioumen.

Now let's practice these endings with some real scriptures. Supply the missing Greek words for these scriptures, then read them aloud several times, trying to get a feel for what they might mean. Afterward, you may look them up in your English Bible to see how they are translated (but not beforehand!).

John 8:37

John 8:37

2 Cor 4:13

2 Cor 4:13

little word alert: kaican mean either "also" or "and".

James 2:8

James 2:8

1 John 1:6

1 John 1:6

Luke 6:46

Luke 6:46


Footnotes:

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John 1:29

John 1:29


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Matthew 22:16

Matthew 22:16