I find it rather disastrous to fall behind in vocabulary.

–David Black

I know this from experience! Print out flashcards right away. If you have a paper cutter that works great. If not, use a scissors and do them one chapter at a time. Over time divide them into piles. One for those you know well, one for new ones that you’re still learning and one for those that are in between. I just used the book but you can’t separate those that you know well from those you need to go over more often. And memorizing them in the same order all the time doesn’t help either.

There are many software options out there too. I’m one who would rather use technology and the computer than old fashioned stuff but for vocabulary, plain old paper flashcards seem to work the best for me.

Just do it.

Learn to Read New Testament Greek, Third Edition by David Alan Black

This book and the companion workbook are review copies sent to me by the publisher, B&H Publishing Group of LifeWay Christian Resources, via NetGalley. I appreciate the opportunity to review these materials.

This review is written by someone learning Greek on their own. I hope this is helpful for someone in the same situation or for someone who is brushing up on Greek learned in the past.

I have looked extensively at a couple of the other popular beginning Greek grammars although I won’t be doing any direct comparisons.

Regarding the aesthetics, the hardcover is very sturdy in addition to being very appealing to look at. The black cover is a nice tie-in to the author’s last name. The paper is high quality, crisp and white which takes to a highlighter very well. The conjugations are in gray shaded boxes which helps them stand out and makes them easy to locate when wanting to go back and review them. The only thing I don’t like is that the font chosen for the Greek is a little less formal than what most of us are used to seeing which takes a little while to get used to.

In a word this book is efficient. There are no chapter overviews, introductions, summaries,  what you’ll learn in the next chapter, etc. which is usually annoying anyway. The author gets right down to business in each chapter. Each of the 26 chapters are short enough that you don’t need those things.

This doesn’t mean the book’s information is skimpy. You will learn a lot of the important terms so that when you read a more technical Bible commentary or read what others write about Greek, you will have learned or at least have a reference for the terms at the beginning level which are explained well.

The exercises for the first 17 chapters of the book are made-up sentences in Greek that the student translates. All of the words in the sentences are from vocabulary that has been learned previously in the book.

Starting in chapter 18, Bible verses are used for the exercises. When there is a word in a verse that hasn’t been learned, the English gloss (a short basic definition) is listed in parenthesis next to the Greek word. This is much nicer than at least one other book where the extra vocabulary is listed on another page, sometimes requiring a page turn so that one is constantly flipping back and forth. There is an answer key for the exercises in the Appendix at the end of the book.

For more extensive exercises there is a companion workbook, sold separately. There is no answer key in the workbook, but if you write to the publisher, they will send you one in PDF format. The workbook (which was a pleasant surprise since I didn’t expect it to be sent to me) has all sorts of exercises coming at the Greek from many angles.

Verbs are introduced in chapter 2 and all of the indicative verbs are covered by chapter 17. There are various methods for introducing verbs in the books I’ve seen. I like having them introduced early so that they can be reviewed frequently as time goes on. There are very helpful charts of the indicative verb forms in the middle of the book. I wish I would have known this earlier so that I could have referred to it as I went along but it wasn’t mentioned earlier in the book. There is also a very helpful large fold-out complete Greek Verb Chart glued to the inside of the back cover.

There are a couple of very important items that were put in footnotes which I think should be in the main part of the text. (There are very few, thankfully, and they are at the end of each section where they are easy to see.) In particular is footnote iii. on page 31 which mentions that kai can mean “both”, “also” or “even”. So be sure to pay close attention to the footnotes.

I believe this book is a very efficient way to learn beginning level Greek. I would think it would be especially useful for someone reviewing Greek that they’ve already learned. I like to use more than one book to be able to read things explained in different ways, but this book is my first choice for the primary book to study and I highly recommend it.

Buy it from Amazon.com

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: B&H Academic; Third edition (March 1, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 0805444939

What I need encouragement for is how useful learning beginning Greek will be.

I’ve gotten to like learning it somehow and I’ve even gotten interested in how the language works, which is highly unusual for me. I hated learning Spanish. I’m not a nerd like many of you. I do have a feeling that God is leading me along this path and that it will be ‘profitable’ but I still have doubts.

But when I read posts like this I think about how paltry my learning will be and how much I’ll be able to read, understand and benefit from after going through Black’s beginning book (which I’m a little more than half-way through) plus a very basic linguistics book (probably also by Black) and maybe just a little of something else. I really don’t want to spend much more time than that on the language. There is so much other stuff I want to read and learn.

I’m normally somebody who goes all out with whatever I do. I can’t just do something as a light ‘hobby’ or it isn’t as much fun. I know I’m free to learn as much as I want. But like I said, I just don’t want to spend that much time on it.

Any words of encouragement for me and anyone else in the same situation?

I’ve been using Croy’s A Primer of Biblical Greek. Partly because it was suggested along with Black’s by Mike Aubrey and partly because it includes passages from the LXX in the exercises and maybe a couple of other reasons I can’t remember.

I’m a NetGalley reviewer and I requested Black’s new 3rd edition of Learn to Read New Testament Greek. After I requested it they said they’d be asking for my class size and where I teach. Ha. So I wouldn’t be getting that one. But then a week later I found it in the mail along with the workbook too! I feel guilty but I’m going to do a good review for them especially since I bought Mounce’s also.

In looking through Black’s book I like it better. It’s more efficient but at the same time explains terms that Croy’s doesn’t. As an example, in an exercise in Croy’s book, I didn’t understand how someone could be taught by the word if ‘word’ is a dative. But in Black’s book it explains that it’s an instrumental dative. However Black’s will leave out things that aren’t as important like rules of accenting which are put in an appendix.

I find myself learning more in less space in this book. It’s probably a little less comprehensive so when I’m done I’ll go to Croy and Mounce.

I got Mounce just to get a really rounded education and to do a good comparative review of Black’s and it’s very good of course but there’s just a little too much stuff going on compared to Black. I like how Mounce as the Exegetical Insight at the beginning of each chapter which I’ll be reading. Black also helps more with exegetical skills.

Look for a review in the future.

I’m going through France’s commentary on Matthew. There is a very truncated introduction because the commentary is already 1200 pages long and he wrote a previous book called Matthew: Evangelist and Teacher which he expects you to read. So I checked out An Introduction to the New Testament: Contexts, Methods and Ministry Formation by David A. deSilva from the library for the second or third time. Since I had book money I decided to finally just buy it. My little library is sorely lacking in reference materials. This came highly recommended by Mike Aubrey and others and since I was able to take a look at it I knew I would like it. It was “A 2005 Gold Medallion finalist!” One of the things I really like about it is it “integrate[s] instruction in exegetical and interpretive strategies with their customary considerations of authorship, dating, audience and message”. (added emphasis)

Our group Bible study is going to be studying Ecclesiastes, which was my suggestion so I’m very glad about that. I already had Eaton’s Ecclesiastes and decided to spend another whole $6 and by Kidner’s (used) just to get another look. I may do a brief comparison at some point. I found that I like the NLT Study Bible’s treatment of Ecclesiastes better than the ESVSB mainly because the NLTSB is more thorough with more quantity of helpful information. I love Ecclesiastes and love it even more now.

I’ve been “learning” Greek using Croy’s beginning grammar book. I had been thinking it might be nice to get Black’s and/or Mounce’s just to get a well rounded treatment and possibly help me learn some things better by having them explained differently. I’m a NetGalley reviewer and requested Black’s Learn to Read New Testament Greek. After I requested it I saw that it’s only for teachers. But they sent it to me anyway. And not a galley but the book with the workbook! So I thought in order to do a good review of it, I might as well get Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar to do a good comparison of all three. In reading some of the Amazon reviews of the Mounce I see that it’s good for people who are self teaching. I did not know that as Johnny Carson would say. So I’m looking forward to all of this. I’ll say that the Black book is beautiful. You’ll see a review of that in the future.

After Matthew I’ll be going through John with the help of Carson’s The Gospel According to John: An Introduction and Commentary (Pillar New Testament Commentary).

I think that brings my slowly growing library to well over a hunderd (sic) books. I bet you’re jealous. My library is smaller than yours and I’m content (Phil 4:11-13).

Here is a video posted on the Koinonia blog in a post titled (entitled?) Con Campbell discusses how his book fits with Wallace’s, Mounce’s, and other texts.

As someone who is a beginner in learning some Greek, I think it’s very important for me to remember that the vocabulary I’m learning are just glosses–simple definitions that don’t cover the whole range of meaning. The same would go for grammar terms.

I think this is important for those of us who look up a word in a lexicon like Strong’s and expect to find the meaning of a word or unlock any information we don’t get from an English translation. The people who translate the Bible in general are extremely knowledgeable about the original languages aside from the disagreements some people have on certain passages in certain translations (I need to cover myself for those who will protest that thought).

I think what’s most helpful for a word or phrase study is to compare it in at least six different translations of different styles ranging from the more literal (formal equivalence or whatever more current term you’d like to use) all the way to paraphrase. This will show you how different translators handled the text, especially if different Greek manuscripts were used for different translations.

Keep in mind these are comments from the peanut gallery so I hope I’m not embarrassing myself too much.

When I mentioned I was going to start learning Greek some people wanted to know how things are coming along.

I don’t know what happened, but Greek became interesting to me starting a couple of weeks ago. It’s not just something I’m trying to learn so that I can use a reader’s NT and understand a good bit of what I’m reading, but it’s actually interesting to learn how things work, understand things that perplexed me for a while and a light bulb goes off, word order (not that I understand it), how economical it is etc. This makes the exercises much less frustrating. I won’t say it’s fun, but it’s interesting.

That’s a great thing God has done because I’m not naturally interested in languages.

It’s going slow because of my age, time I’m willing to spend (although I’m working on it every day), mental energy or lack of, especially with all the medical stuff, and wanting to learn it well. I decided not to think negatively of this in any way. In fact I’m glad I’m not learning Greek in school or I would forget the majority of it by the time I’m finished racing through it at college speed.

I’m on Chapter 11 out of 32 in the Croy book.

I still don’t think I’ll go beyond Croy’s beginning book, Black’s linguistics book and Campbell’s Verbal Aspect (just because I have it) but hopefully that will be enough to really benefit from it.

Some people wanted to know which beginning Greek book I was going to go with after reading Greek For The Rest Of Us. Although I briefly mentioned what I would be getting in a previous post, on Monday I ordered Croy’s A Primer of Biblical Greek because it’s deductive in style and deals a little bit with the Septuagint. And Mike and Esteban recommend it.

I used a CBD.com gift card and had just a bit left over and came across this–
The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Introductory Articles, Volume 1 for only $5. I’m sure I saw this mentioned on another blog but can’t remember where. Even though it’s a little old, with names like Bruce and Metzger among many others, I felt I couldn’t go wrong at that price. My library is sorely lacking in reference works other than NT commentaries.

I thought I would mention it in case anyone else might be interested.

• Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (1940)¹ – no accents or breathing marks allowed
• Unicode Classical Greek Inputter¹ – click on Greek Letters, click on each letter and then you can paste this into Liddell and Scott, a word processor or whatever you need
• StudyLight Interlinear Study Bible
• The Resurgence Greek Project
• Online-Bibeln – Novum Testamentum Graece (NA 27)² – Buch-Book, Kapitel-Chapter, Vers
• Institute of Biblical Greek
• Guide to Greek Pronunciation Conventions – see links at bottom
• Recordings
• Interlinear Scripture Analyzer (ISA) – standalone software
• Basic Greek And Exegesis – Sample Chapter (PDF)³

HT:
1. Suzanne
2. Esteban
3. Bible Geek Gone Wild

Any others?

See the comments for more.

A friend of mine has a book called Sparkling Gems From The Greek: 365 Greek Word Studies For Every Day Of The Year To Sharpen Your Understanding Of God’s Word which has always intrigued me but I didn’t want to spend the time reading it every day with all the other stuff I want to read.

Many of us were introduced to the new Koinonia blog and on Monday I read the post entitled Monday with Mounce 1. In reading the article I was interested to read his take on the Greek of Romans 1:5, even though I don’t know Greek. Then for some reason, to my surprise this well-known Greek scholar goes into application. This is very refreshing and to me very valuable. It reminds me of what the Sparkling Gems book contains but this is a manageable once-a-week article (not that Sparkling Gems couldn’t be read infrequently) and it’s free.

As an aside, it’s nice to see that although he served as the New Testament chair of the ESV Bible translation he also says that the TNIV (probably) got it right in this case. Which is nice to hear, since these two translations unfortunately often have two vehemently opposing camps.