Customer Reviews

Learn to Read New Testament Greek

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a first year Greek student, I found Mounce's large tome on Introductory Greek, with its verbosity and endless depth, to be extremely intimidating. In my opinion, Black avoids such stumbling blocks for the new Greek student, while offering many outlets and resources for the more advanced student as well. Although there were several places in which my own brilliant Greek professor (Dr. Roy Metts) had to adjust and/or replace Black's instruction (e.g., Black's classification system for Third Declension Nouns is somewhat cumbersome), my opinion of this text remains positive and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning the basics of biblical Greek.
(P.S. Broadman and Holman's printing company did a terrible job in the binding of this book. Almost everyone I know who owns this book has had the pages separate from the binding within a few months. Be prepared to glue it back together!)

For anyone who is tring to learn Greek but is not already a linguistics expert this book is written for you. It divides the language into easy to swallow lessons that gradualy brings you through an introductory course. rather than learning everything about one area of the language before moving on it teaches you enough to get to the next lesson and pretty soon you can write simple sentances. from there he goes back and equips you with more vocab and a better understandign of grammer so that your sentances can get more and more complex.

David Alan Black has provided us with an introductory grammar that is a model of clarity.

This NT Greek grammar is reasonably concise and yet always provides sufficient information for the student to grasp the matter at hand. Compared to "The Basics of Biblical Greek", this grammar does a better job of introducing the student to the syntax (on an elementary level)of the New Testament with clearer explanations of grammatical terminology.

This is an excellent text for a professor to adopt, but it is also highly recommended as a supplement to those who are using Mounce's work. If the student is having difficulty grasping the grammatical point that Mounce is discussing, it is very likely that turning to Black's grammar will clear up the matter. Additionally, Black has an excellent selection of exercises with a complete answer key to the first seventeen chapters as an appendix to the book.

Additional illustrations are judiciously placed throughout the grammar. For example, on the crucial issue of mastering Participles, Black offers 34 sentences with translation in the body of the text.

This is a "must have" resource for first year Koine Greek students - and is well worth a second look by instructors who have chosen other texts.

David Alan Black's "Learn to Read New Testament Greek" is a very clearly written introduction to NT Greek. It's excellent for anyone (like myself) who is learning NT Greek without the benefit of formal classroom instruction.

Black's grammar is compact and very portable, but this does not subtract any from its utility or comprehensiveness. His examples are very relevant and he uses a good combination of actual readings from the New Testament itself as well as original sentences for the student to translate.

If you are looking for an all-around good grammar, I would suggest Black as your choice and to supplement it with Warren Trenchard for vocabulary studies and Daniel Wallace's "Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics" for more advanced study.

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.

This review won't be worth anything except to those who want to use it on Kindle. The book appears to be written in a straight-forward, easy-to-understand manner. The problem is that it doesn't work well for use on Kindle.

Some of the letters within the text aren't representative of the Greek letters (an h for a lower case eta, for example). At the points where one is to read a paragraph of Greek text for practice, the text is very small and the letters are not clear. Increasing the Kindle text size only increases the size of the English text, not the representative Greek texts to be read for practice, so I found the Greek text to be unreadable.

If you're considering purchasing this as a Kindle download, try the sample first to see whether it will be of use to you. I have the original Kindle; I have no idea if it will work better on the new one or on one of the smartphone apps.

Excellent resource for personal study or classroom instruction in the elements of NT Greek. The author's presentation is very clear, with explanations that will make the grammar easy to understand even for those with little background in the subject.

I prefer William Mounce's "The Basics of Biblical Greek" to this grammar by David Alan Black as a first choice for those beginning to learn Biblical Greek; but...

This book has more than a few areas where it deals with its material in a way that is different from (and in some cases superior to) that of Mounce. The preposition section on particular is wonderful.

I highly recommend this text as a supplement to that of Mounce.

Next to Bill Mounce's BBG, this has to be the best learning aid I have found to date when it comes to it's topic. It is fairly easy for the GED class individual. In other words, those of us with degrees from the school of hard knocks and who can't necessarily afford or don't have the time for formal schooling concerning such.