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 The Best in Class July 8, 2008
The entire study package of Basics of Biblical Greek which includes the textbook, the study guide, the vocabulary cards, the summary sheet, and the lecture CD's is a blessed fruit of a long, thoughtful, meticulous, and high-tech labor of one of the world's best New Testament Greek scholars. I have to admit I have not studied Greek from other professors, but after studying Mounce, I simply can not imagine a better way to teach students an introduction to Biblical Greek than the one Prof. Mounce implements in this study packet. The structure and methodology are so impressively organized that I believe, without trying to diminish the role of an instructor, one can study by himself or herself without taking the class at a seminary. From start to finish, Prof. Mounce designs the lessons with solid exegesis skills as the goal in mind. He wastes no time but immediately exposes students with translation exercises using real Scripture passages in the study guide, even early in the first few chapters when he barely starts with nouns.
The lessons are divided into three major parts; nouns, adjectives and verbs. Each chapter begins with exegetical insights related to the topic being taught in that particular chapter. He then moves on by explaining the English and Greek forms. The nouns and adjectives are not too bad. They are usually divided into three types of declensions. While the nouns usually take on one of the three declensions, the most common configuration of adjectives is either 3-1-3 or 2-1-2 where the first, second and third numbers indicate the declension type for masculine, feminine and neuter genders, respectively. There are some discussions on special-case nouns having slightly abnormal endings; pant and ent, for examples. Now verbs are considerably more challenging because they not only have more numerous categories and rules, but the biggest obstacles are the tense stems and when they form the real verbs through a combination of augments, tense-formatives, connecting vowels, and personal endings. The trouble can be illustrated by comparing it to having to memorize the English present, past and perfect tenses of irregular and regular verbs which the Greek version has six; present, future active, aorist active and passive, perfect active and passive, instead of three in English. And each of these six stems has different forms not only depending on the person and number, but also on the voices; active, middle, and passive. On top of these, there is another parameter, called aspect, where these verbs take on other forms, the indicative covered in the early chapters of the verbs, subjunctive, infinitive and imperative. Some are similar if not the same as the indicatives, which make them even harder to distinguish which one is which. Here Prof. Mounce reminds students to always watch for the contexts. Context is your best friend when it comes to translation. There is no easy way of getting around this issue completely except in my view, to get the Greek Morphology text, also by Mounce. At the end of some chapters, there is coverage on extended materials that deal with special cases, additional rules in translation, contraction and morphology.
The summary sheet consists of all important rules involving word formation, verb-ending charts, and all the forms of frequently used verbs. It serves as a handy guide for students when doing the translation so they don't have to flip through the pages of the textbook. Some flipping of pages is inevitable, though, because the last few pages of the textbook has the list of major lexicons.
There are two types of drills in the study guide. The first is chapter-by-chapter review where students are asked to parse ten words in a table having the forms that have been covered up to that chapter. Next, there is a warm-up translation section consisting of seven short phrases or sentences to be translated before the real translation exercise begins with twenty sentences; some are long ones. From my experience, I sometimes had a headache after completing the translation work due to the intensity it involves in figuring out not only what the words mean, but also their forms, and how to restructure the sentence in English format that both are understandable and make sense. The second type of drill is the exam-type where the test materials are combined every five chapters. The tasks include parsing, grammar rules, and translations usually from a New Testament passage.
As in any other languages, learning Greek requires extra memory power, but not brute-force memorization of every single word indiscriminately. Prof. Mounce always warns students only to memory special-case words and rules such as endings and contractions, instead of every single word with all its garden variety of forms. Excellent advise.
Needless to say, I delightfully endorse Prof. Mounce as your virtual Greek instructor. If you decide to homeschool yourself, you can purchase the complete combo set at teknia dot com. I don't think Amazon sell the lecture CD set. But even if you are taking the class at the seminary, I don't see any harm for you to buy the combo set anyway, though you probably won't need the lecture CD's provided you have an excellent instructor.
A must have for anyone learning Greek at home June 6, 2008
Recently I decided to teach myself Greek. I've attempted it before using other grammars without much success. The main stumbling block for me was that other authors assumed I knew what sujective case or nominative predicate meant. I didn't, but Mounce gives the reader a crash course in English grammar along with the Greek lessons. Learning has actually turned out to be fun and easy! I simply cannot recommend this text highly enough.
The workbook, flash cards and vocabulary CD are great adjuncts to the text.
 Good Book for reason I purchased May 18, 2008
I purchased the book to help with Bible translation work. It is a reasonable resource for this type of work. As with all things there is no easy substitute for hard work. Greek Grammar is probably more difficult than most - so it is not a book that you can pick up and within a short time be able to speak and read Greek. Still requires lots of work. There is a lot of reading, memorizing and studying. You also have to have an extensive understanding of the grammar of your mother tongue.
Best Grammar I have seen May 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is the best grammar I have used in my 18 years in the ministry. I have tutored Greek students on occasion and have found this grammar to be the best grammar available. The "inductive" approach is very easy to follow. I highly recommend this grammar as a primary to anyone reviewing their Greek (or secondary grammar to any student) who wants a clear overview of Koine Greek. I use it as part of my daily reading and study.
After learning Dr. Mounce's noun and verb rules for recognizing the "roots," I no longer need to memorize so many paradigms. Once I learned the morphology of the language, the large amount of memorization other grammars require is greatly reduced. This grammar is a must study (or review) for any preacher or teacher working in the New Testament Greek text.
 Excellent Way to Learn Beginning Biblical Greek February 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book has proven to be an excellent way for me to learn enough Biblical Greek to at least have an understanding of why different interpretations of scripture are debated among scholars. I am a lay reader of Biblical Greek and Hebrew and this more or less beginner course was very helpful. Prof. Mounce keeps the reader encouraged with his count of NT Greek word occurrences and a tally of the number of words in the NT one can read based on vocabulary progress from chapter to chapter. Why, after only learning the vocabulary of 8 chapters and only 72 Greek words, I can read over 50% of the words in a Greek NT. (Of course, that means I must skip around to read half of the NT and I am reading words like "and" and "the" etc. a lot, but it is a fun way to keep up with progress. The exegetical insights at the beginning of each chapter are very interesting ways of gaining a sense of the reasons for varying interpetations of scripture.
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