Customer Reviews

Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is an excellent NT Greek grammar. Unlike some Greek grammars (notably Hansen and Quinn's Attic grammar, one I have experience with), this is ideally suited for the self-learner. Here's why:

- Mounce tries to minimize the amount of memorization required. Greek is a difficult language, no two ways about it: but the way the material is presented can make learning easier or harder. For those of us who come at it as adults, memorization is difficult. Some grammars require massive amounts of rote memorization; Mounce takes instead the tack of giving you a number of rules to apply, then only requiring memorization where the rules don't apply. Using this method, the amount of memorization is cut dramatically, and the effort required is reduced accordingly.

- To ease the remaining memorization, Mounce includes lots of good vocabulary helps. Unfortunately, vocabulary acquisition is usually another rote memorization affair. Mounce includes either derivations or cognates in other languages (drawing in some cases on Metzger's "Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek"), or silly little memorization aids. An example of the latter is Mounce's memorable word play on the word ELPIS (="hope"): "Some people HOPE that ELVIS did not die." I think I can safely say I will never forget the meaning of ELPIS.

- In many ways (including the previous two items) Mounce includes the fruit of his years of experience as a teacher of New Testament Greek. Many books that I'm sure would be just fine when learning from a professor completely fall apart when an autodidact (like myself) attempts to use them. With this book, it's almost as good as Mounce being right there.

- Although I would not have believed it, Mounce has successfully integrated devotional sections at the beginning of most chapters. A combination textbook/devotional? Yes, believe it or not. The section for chapter 10, for example, is simply amazing - building off John 1:14, KAI hO LOGOS SARX EGENETO ("And the Word became flesh.") This answers another big problem for autodidacts, which is that you don't have much of an inducement to continue when the going gets tough. These devotional sections (I am assuming a Christian student, of course) add greatly to your experience and make you look forward to new chapters.

The end result is that this book makes it possible to learn New Testament Greek on your own to just about the same depth as you would get at a seminary. That's an amazing feat in itself.

But be aware, this book has no exercises in it. Rather, you need to buy the companion workbook, which has all the exercises.

I was disappointed when I had to switch teachers following my first semester of Greek. However, it was well worth it--because I switched to a class using Mr. Mounce's book: "Basics of Biblical Greek." It is excellent!

Mr. Mounce is a genius at teaching Greek. It is simple that he should re-title the book to "Greek for Dummies" (lets face it--when it comes to Greek, we're all dummies).

The text book completely divides the nouns and verbs into two semesters. As a student who spent a semester trying to do both verbs and nouns at the same time with no system like the one Mounce uses...let me tell you: this book is very helpful.

Along the way Mr. Mounce explains concepts first in how they are used in English grammar. He then teaches the Greek grammar. This was most useful to me because my English grammar is a little sub-par.

Another quality of this book that I really enjoyed were the exegetical insights at the beginning of each chapter-it is always nice to know why what you are learning is of importance.

All in all, the "Basics of Biblical Greek" is a great book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. If you want to learn Biblical Greek, this book is the first book you will want to get a hold of.

If you've read "Greek for the Rest of Us" by William Mounce and decided that you really wanted to learn the basics of Biblical Greek including vocabulary then this is the book that you will want. William Mounce has a gift for taking the Greek language and making it approachable even to those who have tried before but not succeeded in learning Biblical Greek. While there are many, many grammar details to learn such as whether something is dative, nominative, accusative, genitive, active, passive, dependent, independent, etc. Mr. Mounce actually makes it interesting and finds ways to keep the student interested and feeling positive about their progress. All those grammar rules are very important in correctly interpreting the Greek texts and in understanding English translation. Sometimes there is no English equivalent for a Greek word, sometimes we can only approach a correct translation by approximating a similar word in English, but then our personal prejudices and beliefs affect the word that we choose. Understanding Greek is important to a serious level of study of New Testament writings. This book gives you the basic ability to look through a Greek text or Interlinear Translation of the Bible and understand not only what is said, but also what is actually meant but the text. This is a very highly recommended text for anyone desiring to learn Biblical Greek and one of the best books on the subject that I have ever read.

I bought Mounce's BBG, the workbook (which is absolutely necessary) and a copy of UBS4 text in lieu of taking the class at seminary. It was $ for the class and under $ for the books. I just did the math. I wondered how far I would go. I started Dec. 26, 2002 and here I am in July 12, 2003. I am now on Chapter 33 out of 35.

I have read through - very slowly and haltingly 1 John and James and am up to Revelation 8- (this is totally on my own, but a result of trying to put into practice the principles of the book.)

Along the way I picked up some other books - Rogers and Rogers Linguistic key - basically a verse by verse parsing guide and linguistic commentary (it has lots of mistakes so you need to be careful!); Trenchard's Vocabulary Guide, and BDAG lexicon Before this, I had a GRAMCORD computer module that gives parsings for every NT word, but I had no idea what to do with it. Now I do!

Obviously I have not quit yet! So that is a good recommendation right there. The other day I had an epiphany. I read through Revelation 5 directly from the Greek text and looking up words in Trenchard in 1½ hours! I do my personal Bible reading first in the Greek text and only look at the NASB and NIV afterwards. So I feel that I have made some progress.

The book will only make you memorize 320 words or so. But remember that nouns and adjectives have 4 major cases with lots of declensions and verbs have zillions of forms and conjugations - so those 320 words will keep you busy. When I got to Chapter 33 on imperatives about a month ago - I realized that I was very fuzzy on the verb forms so I did a complete review of Chapters 15-32 (it took a month.) Now I feel more confident.

Since I have no other formal Greek training, I can't tell you how Mounce compares with others, but I am really reading the Greek text and that is just too cool!

If I had to do it over I would. Every one of the books that I have listed above has helped me. If you can get a GRAMCORD module it really helps when you just aren't sure what to make of a word form - and especially when Rogers seems to be way off! I try to use the tools as a last resort now - but in the beginning when I had no idea of what I was doing - they were completely indispensable.

Mounce's text is excellent for learning the basics of New Testament Greek. He develops the grammatical structures with careful explanation, so much so that you really feel you have a teacher with you when you read it. His approach highlights the reasons why things happen the way they do in Greek verbs and nouns. Because he stresses the identification of connecting vowels and tense formatives, and separates the verb endings into two major categories (primary and secondary), the student sees more of the consistency in the language, and has less to memorize. This alone makes the book superior to most others. It is complete with all the tenses and structures that are necessary to enable the student to begin their own translations of New Testament passages. The only drawback is that there are no exercises in the text, but this can be remedied by getting the supplementary workbook. My advice: go for it.

I have struggled for years with Ray Summer's Essentials book. Then after a long 2 week search I decided to get this book by Mounce. Without going into a detailed explaination, I state this book is one of the best. If you are even partially considering getting this book, then go ahead and get it. You will not be disappointed.

Many greek teachers are now switching from Summer's grammar to Mounce's grammar. Mainly because this book is detailed, explanatory, helpful, thorough, and very informative. It is very thick...this ain't no cheapo "brief-descripto" grammar written by someone who had nothing to do on vacation. This book is written by an expert. Mounce has studied greek from a very young age. While most of us were throwing rocks at the neighbor's cat, William was being taught how to speak in greek. I have been using this book on a private self-study for 3 months now. I not only give it 5 stars, I give it 5 more stars.

I was one of Dr. Mounce's students. I studied Greek with him in the 98-99 school year and I still have retained almost all of what I learned through this book and Dr. Mounce. The book is informative and easy to use and study.

The CD ROM is excellent as well, and is a good tool for review.

If you want to learn Biblical Greek, but don't want to memorize the many, many paradigms that the traditional method requires, you should get this book.

I was in Dr. Mounce's first summer intensive Greek class at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (1 year of Greek in 2 months!) and am now currently teaching this course from this text to a lay church audience. I find this book to be great for reference and look back to it to review a lot of grammar.

For myself, being a detail-oriented person and a natural at languages (Meyers-Briggs type: ESTJ/ISTJ) I found this fairly intuitive to pick up following the system that Dr. Mounce prescribes. Dr. Mounce and I have also discussed this grammarian compared to others (like J. Grescham Machen's), and I think he's right in that he puts third declension nouns in the beginning (Chapter 10) instead of at the end; some of Greek does build upon this material (e.g., square of stops).

The book is laid out into the first half being mostly article/adjective/noun/pronouns (including declensions, cases, prepositions) and the second half mostly related to verbs and participles (Tenses covered: Present, Future, 1st/2nd Aorist, Imperfect, Perfect, Voices: Active, Middle, Passive, Moods: Indicative, Subjunctive, Imperative, all types of participles, -mi verbs).

The best things include the exegetical insights and the vocabulary helps (some of these are from Dr. Bruce M. Metzger). Dr. Mounce also has two other tools that are useful for learning Greek, his Analytical Lexicon and the Workbook that accompanies this textbook. Dr. Mounce also held extra-curricular sessions where he and students offered their suggestions for mnemonics to memorize the vocabulary and also the grammar.

One thing that this textbook does not emphasize is that there often is no subtle/cool/nice way of learning grammar and vocabulary; sometimes you just need to "by-brute-force" rote-memorize-this-darn-paradigm. (Repetition is key.)

In teaching this book, I have found that most people have found this book to be good, but there are still some publishing errors and some difficult sections. Dr. Mounce would occasionally run off his computer re-worked sections (chapters) of his book, and ask for commentary, so I assume this is still in progress.

Again, repetition is key, and the better you know Greek, the more you can get out of the Greek New Testament.

Some people who are more inductive/intuitive learners (and also those who like to see the big picture/forest before they get into details/trees) will find this book rather frustrating; keep in mind that Mounce tries to teach the rules (rather than the exceptions, which he footnotes -- and these footnotes are mostly for the student who wants to understand the exceptions, trivia, and other information), and tries to find a system to organize the grammar. I've had at least one or two inductive/intuitive learners comment about this book, and if you are such, you may need to learn by grammar blocks (e.g., chapters 6-10, first second and third declensions, chapters 11-14 pronouns, chapters 16-24 verbs, etc.) Intuitive/inductive/big picture learners will have a hard time since Mounce teaches you block-by-block and you don't see how it all interrelates until later.

Dr. Mounce does leave out of his book some hints which he did cover in class; for instance, he says you should learn both the stem and the verb paradigm for the Present Active Indicative, or that you should memorize the various stems for the various verbs that have multiple stems (i.e., in the aorist or perfect or future). As well, Dr. Mounce leaves out a lot of worksheets and extra exercises (e.g., blank master verb charts, blank master noun charts) and exams that made learning Greek better. As well, I have found that making chapter summaries very helpful.

The text book which follows this is Daniel B. Wallaces "Greek Grammar Beyond The basics," which explains many grammatical details better (e.g., the middle being the "voice of self-interest").

The goal of the book is very clear in the introduction: it is not designed to teach ancient Greek thoroughly, but rather to give students enough Greek to pick their way through some basic New Testament passages. At least in the context in which I learned and taught with this book, the "basic" nature of this text was underemphasized. One can certainly move on to further study, and many do, but they have a lot of relearning to do if they start with Mounce.

So caveat emptor: This book is a great choice if you want a minimal approach that uses a lot of "hand holding" along the way, but it is not appropriate if you really want to learn ancient Greek. Some examples:

1. It completely and consciously ignores accentuation (except for a few words in which the difference can only be determined by accent). The problem with this is that accentuation is actually pretty important for moving to an intermediate understanding of the language. Basic principles of accenting are easy enough to learn and there really is no excuse for at least having an overview of the system (at least for verbs). Ignoring them builds a handicap into one's learning.

2. It does not introduce very much vocabulary (350 words, >50 occurrences). Vocabulary is the absolute gateway into a language. It does not matter how much grammar and syntax one understands if she doesn't know the meaning of the word she is looking at. In modern education, there is such a de-emphasis on memorization and, in my experience, there is often the attitude that one does not need to memorize vocabulary because words can always be looked up. This is very true, but the more one has to run to a dictionary (or even mouse over a word in BibleWorks), the less likely one is to keep trying. Simply put, the more words you recognize on the page, the more fun reading Greek is and, more importantly, the less frustrating it is. In my view, the vocabulary should roughly double in an introductory course to get down to 30 occurrences. Even for one who is at the "beginner" level, knowing as much vocabulary as possible is absolutely critical.

3. It uses a system of diagnostics rather than paradigms for teaching declension and conjugation. Rather than having students memorize paradigms, Mounce teaches the "building blocks" of verbs and nouns. This is potentially valuable, but it reinforces the idea of language as a simple engineering exercise and does not facilitate true learning of Greek. It drives home the idea that each form is to be taken apart and analyzed. Now, I do need to keep in mind the audience of this text. Students using BBG are not learning Greek to be ancient Greek scholars, and so in some ways this approach of "language as decoding" is not all bad for this purpose. I am just very wary of it overall and so I have a hard time recommending it for any audience.

4. It introduces the entire noun system and declensions (chapters 1-14) before getting to verbs, participles, etc. (chapters 15-35). Mounce states that he does this because it is easier to handle nouns before moving to verbs. I disagree. I understand putting off the more difficult aspects of verb study until later chapters, but to present essentially nothing of verbs for so long (a good couple months in a semester) is handicapping one's learning. As a result, he has to gloss just about every single verb in the exercises for the first 14 chapters. I just don't see how this is valuable. He should at least introduce the present tense and then just give present tense verbs for a while.

5. The workbook contains very few drills and no English to Greek (except in one or two chapters on prepositions, I think, or maybe pronouns). Drilling is a critical component of learning a language and students tied to the workbook in this text series have almost none of it. Each chapter has 10 parsing drills where a student decodes a form, 5-6 "warm-up" exercises of made-up phrases and then a good number of true sentences from the GNT. But there are no drills that force the student to really understand and get comfortable with the forms and grammar. And of course the focus should not be on composing Greek, but doing SOME Greek composition is, in my view, irreplaceable in cementing forms, grammar and syntax. And this is NOT just for advanced students. I have found in teaching this material that often students who struggle the most benefit greatly from Greek "composition." At minimum, this mean transforming Greek nouns and verbs into the requested case or tense. I have had numerous students who just didn't get the concept of case until we did some English to Greek exercises and they saw that case does what word order does in English.

So, after all of these complaints, why do I yet give it three stars? Because, simply put, I realize my own bias towards a rigorous study of Greek and I probably don't take into account the needs of students who are getting just enough Greek to get through a commentary or whatever. Many, many people have successfully learned Greek from this book, and at the end of the day, who am I to knock it?

I would simply caution those who have a choice of textbooks to be very aware of the limitations of this book. For a better introduction to ancient Greek, even for New Testament studies, see Mastronarde's Introduction to Attic Greek or even Athenaze. If you are able in your studies, I believe it is far more valuable to start with Attic Greek and then move to the New Testament.

Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek sets the standard for introductory biblical Greek grammars. While there is a plethora of introductory grammars I believe this one is the most thorough, clear, and user-friendly. Zondervan has produced an excellent Greek curriculum of which Mounce's Grammar is but the beginning of the journey in learning the original language of the New Testament.

There are many positive dimensions, which set Mounce's grammar above the rest. First, for today's modern reader he does not assume that English grammar is known. He has two chapters (5 & 15), which provide broad overviews to English grammar, and its correspondence to Greek grammar. Then each chapter also contains introductory English grammar and shows it relationship to Greek.

Secondly, this work is generally very clear and understandable. A student seeking to learn Greek on his own should with the grammar, workbook, and included CD-Rom be able to successfully master the concepts of beginning Greek. Another advantage is the amount of tools and commitment to progress exhibited by Mounce and Zondervan in this series. It is clear that they want the student to learn Greek in order to glorify God. Such resources would include the companion workbook, the CD-Rom and the additional materials found on the website (see below).

A basic chapter flow is as follows: Each chapter is introduced with an "Exegetical Insight." A well-known scholar provides an insight into the significance of the Greek grammar about to be discussed in the chapter. It helps show why learning Greek is important to understanding the Bible. Secondly, the English grammar concepts are introduced and then the Greek grammar closely follows. Paradigms and explanations are provided in the Greek grammar section. Next, there is a helpful chapter summary which sums up all of the important concepts covered in the chapter. Following is the vocabulary to be memorized. Lastly, there may be a section on advanced information, which is usually not essential material to be mastered.

As previously mentioned, one of the most helpful aspects of this grammar is the many companion tools. The CD-Rom contains software programs called Flashworks and Parseworks. The Flashworks program is basically an electronic flashcard system, which allows the user to tailor the vocabulary to the specific vocabulary in the Mounce chapter. Personally, Flashworks was a big help in providing another medium to learning the vocab. Parseworks was not as helpful. While I would encourage the student to work with Parseworks I often became tired of having to select each tense, voice, mood, etc... from the drop down menus. It was not as user-friendly as Flasworks.

The website ... also has a good amount of helpful resources. There you will find chapter revisions (definitely download the revision for chapter 20 - it will make a lot more sense!). You can also download the Language Learning Tools (Flashworks and Parseworks); and a very helpful 35-page summary of the first 25 chapters of Mounce's grammar. There is also a revision of the workbook, which allows for an early introduction of verbs. The teacher will find downloadable overheads, quizzes, and the answers to the workbook.

A few negative comments: First, in his attempt to bring together a textbook which incorporates both a deductive and inductive method of learning there is a tendency to de-emphasize memorization. While Mounce is at pains (in sympathy with the student) to minimize needless memorization sometimes it just has to be done. There is no avoiding the vast amount of memorization in learning a language. Painful as it may be I believe it is the key to learning the language.

Secondly, while Mounce is usually clear he is not always concise. He tends to lose the forest for the trees. In the footnotes it is clear that he loves morphology, but it is questionable as to how this will help the beginning student. The beginning student is already facing information overload and such excursions as interesting as they may be may prove unhelpful at this time for the student.

How then should this text be used? Following are a few suggestions, in no particular order, which I found helpful in my study of Biblical Greek. First, use the companion workbook. The grammar and the workbook were meant to go together. Secondly, the workbook section should be treated as a test. One should not progress to the workbook until the corresponding chapter has been mastered. Only then should one tackle the workbook. When the workbook section has been completed then check your work with the grammar and a good English translation.

Thirdly, use the software. Flashworks is easy to use and vocab is best memorized through a variety of mediums. Parseworks can be tedious but still helpful to use. The rest of the CD-Rom is less useful. Fourthly, review, review, and review. I found it helpful to read the chapter numerous times and then also outline the chapter in my own words (even writing out the full paradigms). Repetition is the best way to get the material to sink in. I would suggest not buying vocab cards, but cutting 3x5 index cards into quarters (1/4) and writing them out on your own. Then carry these cards with you wherever you go and whenever you have a chance pull them out to review. You should also pick up Jonathan T. Pennington's New Testament Greek Vocabulary on CD. These two CDs encompass all the words in the New Testament 10x and up. I only wish I had discovered this resource earlier.

Remember, Mounce is not the end but only the beginning. Move onto immersing yourself in the New Testament. Pick up Mounce's Graded Reader of Biblical Greek and Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics.

Most of all seek God in prayer. After all you are learning Biblical Greek to be able to read the New Testament in its original language. Learning Greek is to be an act of worship! Study therefore to the glory of God.