Customer Reviews

Beginning Greek: A Functional Approach

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If you want to learn greek, but tend not to fare too well with programs that teach you deductively--have you memorize vast charts of inflections--then this may be the best book for you. It begins with teaching you Koine--a relatively simple ancient dialect--with the Gospel of John. You translate your first verses without having seen a single grammatical chart! After John, you begin Attic greek with Xenophon's Anabasis. You pick up the language gradually, with practice, much as you would learning a language naturally. For me, this was the book that finally taught me ancient greek.

In more than 30 years of teaching the classical languages, I have used several different Greek texts, and I can attest that Paine's Beginning Greek is an ingeniously developed "inductive" approach to acquiring the rudiments of Classical Greek. Most other texts proceed by minute grammatical increments with practice drills and contrived readings. Paine uses the more accessible koine Greek of the New Testament to move students right into reading real Greek (the Gospel of St. John) and to work back historically to the more difficult Attic Greek of Xenophon and the other classical authors. The grammar is dealt with in a more or less traditional order, but always tied to real Greek; yet-to-study points of grammar are dealt with ad hoc by footnotes to each lesson's short reading. By the time students reach a particular grammatical form for concentrated study (consonant declension nouns, for example), they have already experienced the form several times in natural contexts. This approach requires no more (but no less) patience and steady application than does any other Greek text of my acquaintance, but I believe that, for the assiduous student, the results are deeper and more lasting. Over the years, Paine has become my preferred text for introductory courses in Greek. I am glad it is still in print, available in quantity from Oxford.

I evaluated several Greek texts before choosing this one to teach Koine/Attic Greek to six homeschool students three years ago. I considered Chase & Phillips' "A New Introduction to Greek" (what I used to learn Greek for my B.A. in Classics), Mounces' "Basics of Biblical Greek", and a third title which I do not recall. I wanted to focus on Koine, so I eliminated Chase & Phillips with its focus on the Attic dialect. Mounce spent too much time on deep things other than reading Greek. So, that left Paine. We took two years to work through the text.

What I like about this text is the analytical approach it takes to introducing declensions and conjugations. If you know the rules you can generate the forms, even the 2nd person forms which are subject to reduction and contraction. Combine the verb stems, thematic vowels, tense sign, primary and secondary endings and voila! It works within limits. Does the verb have a 1st or 2nd aorist? Does it have all principal parts? Irregular nouns and verbs are another story.

Some may have described this book as adopting an inductive approach. It is true that students are given real Koine Greek (Gospel of John) and not didactic constructions, but that hardly makes it inductive. The beauty of using the Gospel of John is that students already familiar with the gospel can use this knowledge to direct their beginning efforts.

The first half of the text deals with Koine and first several chapters from the Gospel of John. The text is itself the reference, so, no appendices as in other texts. The second half introduces students to the Attic dialect and readings from Xenophon's the "Anabasis." The text has an excellent but small index. And although the mini-Greek lexicon in the back is adequate, I encouraged many of the students to get Liddell and Scott's "Intermediate Greek Lexicon."

I can't imagine anyone using this to learn Greek on their own--nigh on to impossible unless you know other languages (and highly inflected ones at that, such as Latin). A teacher is needed to set the pace and keep students on track to mastery. If someone were going to attempt it alone, I'd suggest a tape series using a deductive approach. But be warned, your results will probably not be satisfying. Better yet, find a seminary or college which offers Greek courses.

I have to thank those (...) for their endorsement of this book. After fishing for, and buying, some other books on Greek, this is the one I can say has been most beneficial.
There seems no single one acknowledged beginner's text for the independent student (I'm doing this for pleasure). This one I come back to again and again when I want clarity and a modest sense of accomplishment.
Thanks!

I began studying Greek in 1984 at Western Washington Universtiy. My dear professor chose Paine's work as his text, and while at times learning Greek was "Paineful" for all of us in the class, after all these years I am still able to pick up my Greek New Testament and read, even when I let long phases of time pass without using it.

I especially loved the fact that we were reading Biblical text the second day of our introductory class, right after we learned the alphabet. Paine's text made it happen for me, and the pacing of the text allowed us to be introduced to Greek grammatical structures gradually, while we were also introduced to vocabulary.

At the end of our first year,(when we were no longer using Paine's text) many of us complained that we still had to look up so many words in the dictionary. At that time my professor told us that we as a class were reading more proficiently and with larger vocabularies than he was at the end of his third year of Greek studies. It immediately became clear to me that the difference for our success was the skill of my professor as a teacher and the approach he used to teach.

Paine's text was so foundational to that success. I cannot imagine trying to learn Greek any other way than through an inductive method. Even though it was difficult at times to work my way through a passage, I always felt it was doable.

I have heard others bemoan the fact that trying to learn Greek was SO hard, and most remember little to nothing about the language. In perusing another introductory text, I can see why. I am so very grateful that I wasn't taught through a deductive manner. That would be the way of frustration.

We did writing exercises, and we memorized the verb charts in Paine's text (to some degree, at least) but the carrot was always in being given the opportunity to read (and study) real text throughout every lesson.

Though my Greek is rusty compared to what it was 20+ years ago, I will be using Paine's text to teach Greek at my church this fall. I wouldn't want to use anything else.

Though my husband's name appears to be the writer of this review, it is I, Laurie Grooman, who actually wrote this.

I am using this textbook in my third semester of collegiate Greek. As such, the grammar incorporated herein has been a review and the readings a transition into more difficult Greek, such as that of Homer. Because Paine chooses to introduce students to "real" Greek (i.e., Biblical koine) at the very beginning of this text, rather than a text that linearly progresses through the tenses, voices, moods, etc., first-semester (or self-learning) students will likely become confused by the sheer complexity of Greek grammar. As an alternative for beginning students, I would suggest the three-book set published by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers (JACT):

1. Reading Greek: Text and Vocabulary (This is the most essential of the three.),

2. Reading Greek: Grammar and Exercises, and

3. An Independent Study Guide to Reading Greek.

Another option would be the textbook by L.A. Wilding that I used for my first two semesters of collegiate Greek: Wilding's Greek for Beginners.

Good luck in your studies!

I'm very pleased by the writing of the book. Rather than the firehose technique and contrived exercises of, e.g., Hansen & Quinn, it uses *real* Greek from the Gospel of John and Xenophon's Anabasis to take the student from the very basics to more advanced Greek.

I'm also pleased by the typhography of the textbook, which I find lacking in many of its peers. Using the page efficiently makes for a less weighty book, and good layout makes everything readible, searchable and understandable.

Also, I like pseudo-leather book tape that it was bound in : very durable.

I have used two other Greek texts to try to learn the language on my own, Ruck's Ancient Greek: A New Approach and Teach Yourself Ancient Greek. Please tolerate my discussion those other books in this review, since my experience with all of them shapes my evaluation of each of them.

TY's book gets is generally good, but has one fatal flaw--sigma is represented with as a roman letter c, "for reasons of convenience, the one increasingly used in modern editions." I've never seen the usage in any other text and, as such, I assume they mean the convenience of the typesetter and publisher, not the student. Also, the noun declensions are in a different order than one would expect--the other texts have nom., gen., etc. while TY goes nom., voc., acc., gen., dat. The layout of TY is extremely dense, with almost no white space, and is thus a very unpleasant read.

Ruck, though generally excellent, has a fatal flaw for the independent learner--no answers are provided for any exercises. While the layout is the best of the three, with lots of white space making reading it a pleasure, this comes at the sacrafice of row labels for the model declensions and conjugations. A minor annoyance that makes it difficult to tell at first glance what you're looking at. Also, a minor annoyance--the text uses an alternate, cursive form or theta.

The major problem I have with Paine's text can be found on pp. 46-47: a huge , two-page chart conjugating 4 tense systems, 4 voices and 4 moods of the verb to loose, luw. If you multiply that by 6 forms (I, you, s/he, we, you, and they), the number of elements grows to over 300. I found it impossible to digest such a huge gulp of grammar despite rehearsing it repeatedly and doing the exercises. Greek is a very complex language, more so than Latin. However, I see no reason for such an explosion of grammatical complexity.

The layout of the Paine book is very old style: it looks just like the Latin texts used 30 years ago, with all their infelicities. As for the language and approach of the book, I find it a little stuffy--TY or Ruck is straightforward and helpful, not prickly and standoffish like Paine.

I haven't yet found any text that's right for me. Perhaps the Athenaze books, much maligned for being too basic, would be more fitting, although I don't see a teacher's guide for Volume I.

While attending UCONN I used this book to learn Classical Greek in order to prepare me for seminary. The aproach is more natural than noninductive methods that make you memorize everything before you even begin to read the Greek text!! Many other grammers make you write scentences!! What a waste of time! Greek is a dead language that is meant to be made alive through reading and translation! After using this text and reading other Attic Greek writtings, such as the Attic Orators, the Apology of Socrates and Horadatus, I was able to test out of beginning and advanced Greek in seminary and begin to enjoy the richness of the Biblical text! I cannot for the life of me understand why the text is no longer in print!

...this is your book. It takes you through John's gospel first, so you can attend Bible study's and strut your stuff! But seriously, one couldn't ask for a better book on learning Greek.