Customer Reviews

Learn New Testament Greek

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Let me state up front: I am extremely skeptical that one can adequately learn Biblical Greek inductively. With that caveat, this is the best inductive grammar that I have ever seen.

For those who have used previous editions of Dobson's grammar, the third edition offers significant improvements. Some of the noteworthy features include:

1. The book is unusually well printed and a delight to read. If you have ever tried to read books created with inadequate Greek or Hebrew fonts, you will appreciate how important a feature this is - particularly in a grammar for beginners.
2. The book is essentially error free. This is one of the benefits of a third edition, but it is a meaningful benefit. There are few things more frustrating to a new student than trying to figure out why he or she is wrong when it is the text that is in error.
3. Dobson does a superb job of selecting exercises throughout the work. He keeps introducing minor variations so that students don't become lazy knowing what the answer "should be" in this section. This ringing of changes is the genious of inductive language study, and Dobson is a master in this art.
4. Dobson has added simple, brief, grammatical explanations throughout the book that will help students relate what they are learning to traditional deductive grammars.

My concerns:

1. In trying to create excitement about learning Biblical Greek, Dobson implies that the student is becoming more competent than anyone could become through one year of language study. Would you hire someone with only 1 year of German to teach German literature at a University? Of course not! But I fear that students reading only this work could wrongly think that they are ready to criticise the scholars who do the incredibly demanding work of creating quality Bible translations. Mastering Greek is worth the effort - but we should not underestimate the amount of effort and discipline required.
2. To gain an adequate facility with Greek, a student will need to move on to "second year" grammars such as Dana and Mantey or Wallace's "Biblical Greek Beyond the Basics". If the student hasn't worked through a deductive grammar, it will be almost impossible for him or her to grapple with these more advanced works which are necessary for sound exegesis.

So how can I give this book 5 stars?

1. It is the best inductive grammar you can find and just plain fun to read.
2. Dobson's superb selection of material makes this grammar one of the best "readers" available for New Testament Greek. Most students (myself included), need a great deal of practice to achieve proficiency in the language. This book goes a long way toward providing that practice.

My advice: Work through a traditional grammar such as David Alan Black's "Learn to Read New Testament Greek" or Mounce's "The Basics of Biblical Greek". When you are done, turn to Dobson for some delightful practice and continued learning.

Some people love it, some people don't. So you can decide for yourself, let me tell you how the book is set up:

BACKGROUND
Greek is 'inflected' -- depending on their meaning in a sentence, nouns have several forms. The word is 'o logos'. But if you're saying it, the word is 'ton logon.' And if it's Mark's, the word is 'tou logou'. And if you're convincing someone with the word, it's ... well, you get the idea.

The word(s) = o logo, ton logon, tou logou, oi logoi, tous logous, tw logw, etc.

So having a "vocabulary" of Greek words isn't particularly helpful until you get the endings in your brain and tou logou makes you think "[of] the word" more or less automatically, without you really thinking about it.

How hard is it to learn the endings? Plenty. For nouns there are three genders, five cases, single, plural, double, all done in three versions = declensions. 230 endings, all nicely tabularized in my old Greek textbook (not this one). Verbs have tenses, moods and voices.

So all you have to do to read a sentence in Greek is figure out each word's root, identify each ending, match it with the table in your head [nominative, dative, accusative, genitive, dative, or vocative; singular or plural; masculine, feminine or neuter] ... and translate the grammar into English -- quick, you do know the English equivalent of the dative plural of 'book', right? And what's the English aorist subjunctive active form of 'go'? -- and viola, you're on to the next word.

Did I mention "the"? My old text lists 30 !! versions. Thirty ways to say "the": o, tou, ton, to, ta, tw, tous, oi, etc. etc.


METHODS
#1 TRADITIONAL Greek textbooks list tables of noun endings = "declensions." You memorize tables of endings and this helps you read Greek -- the same way, presumably, memorizing the interval of a diminished-minor-7th helps you play Bach on the piano.

If memorizing 230 noun case endings and transmogrifying accusative-ablative-optative-nickelodeons into English is the sort of thing you're good at, traditional Greek textbooks are for you.


#2. THIS BOOK uses THE OTHER METHOD. It teaches you Greek a little bit at a time, by having you practice short grammar-rich sentences. You're learning Greek not by memorizing case ending tables, but by getting your brain to recognize, without stopping to think about it, that ~ou words mean "of ~". This is the way you learned English. You speaks English good, right?

Each section (just three or four pages) introduces a new topic -- little drills on how to say 'the book' or 'the books' for eg. Then there are practice sentences and their translations -- you cover the translation with a card, read the greek, translate it yourself, then move the card and check your translation.

"You are saying." " We are saying." " They are saying." " You speak the words." -- they get tougher as you go along -- "You are writing the words and the prophet is reading the words." " They are the people saying these words."

There are 30 or 50 little drills per section. They don't repeat, they build. The sentences are never beyond the level you're at; they do a great job forcing you to grapple with the subtleties of the grammar. It's hard but not too hard, and a getting each translation right is fun and encouraging. Each week, the stuff you struggled with last week seems easy.

Will you be nuancing Paul in a month? No. You're a beginner. This is difficult stuff.
Will you build a huge list-thingy-of-words-that-you-know? No. This book stuffs grammar in your brain; plenty vocabulary too, but vocabulary isn't really what it's about.
Will you learn all there is to know about Greek? No. But you will learn plenty; the later chapters are extremely complex.

Will you learn a whole bunch, quickly and easily? Yup, you will. And you'll have fun doing it.

---
My own preference is for method #2. This is one w o n d e r f u l little book. A treasure. A gem. A delight. A perfection between two covers. A smart buy. Order once; pay twice -- it'll be worth it.


graphw logous alytheis
I write true words

For Christmas I asked for and received this book and the NT Greek grammar by Mounce at the same time, thinking that they would complement each other. So far, my expectation has been completely fulfilled!

The good points of this book are:

1. It provides lots of practice with reading Greek sentences. Lots of practice is the only way to become fluent in any language, and this book provides it. To me this is the book's primary good point (but see #4 below).

2. As the other reviews say, it gets you into the language right away with few technical details

3. It is highly inductive, meaning it doesn't go thru lists of paradigms and rules, but gets you right into reading the text.

4. This book has the only really good explanation of preposition usage I've seen. They all - including Mounce - show the little boxes with arrows: eis, en, ex, hypo, etc. This is useful as far as it goes. But this book does something I've never seen: it gives multiple examples from the New Testament for each possible meaning of each preposition. For example, most books say "en" means "in, with, or by"; but this book gives you actual NT examples of "en" meaning each of these. Wonderful!

The bad points are:

1. It is highly inductive. I don't think this kind of learning style suits me as an adult at all. True, the deductive method is different from how we learned language as children. Proponents of inductive learning (such as Prof. Harris in his sometimes interesting alternative Latin grammar) always point this out and state without proof that everybody knows the inductive method is superior. And for children, they're probably right. However, we *were* children then. I think it a fairly well-established fact that children learn differently from adults: and the classical schooling model has been based on this fact for 25 centuries. As a result, based both on reason and my own experience, I don't believe that a purely inductive method is the proper framework for adults to learn in; but then I have not surveyed all adults nor performed a controlled experiment on them all. What I think I can say with certainty is that it's not the right framework for *ME* to learn in, and I doubt I'm alone.

2. Going further than most NT grammars (even Mounce to some extent) that don't really explain accentuation rules, this book ignores accents altogether! (It doesn't even print them in the text.) I am still "coasting" on the accentuation rules I learned early and very thoroughly from Hansen and Quinn's Attic Greek book (H&Q does at least one thing right), and I find they really do help. Without even accents printed in the text, I question whether you can get good consistent accent placement, making it much more difficult to talk to others or probably even to remember the words yourself. I naturally find myself using Latin-like accent rules, which is sometimes correct (i.e. present tense of many verbs) but usually goes horribly wrong for nouns and adjectives. Since I have Mounce's grammar also, everytime I find a new word in Dobson's book, I write in the accent. It's a good test for my own understanding, but it shouldn't be necessary.

I believe these problems would make this book not work for me as a stand-alone way of learning Greek. But for somebody who is using another grammar such as Mounce and using this book as a side reading source that gives you lots of practice and another point of view, this book is very useful.

I tried several beginner's books on NT Greek before discovering this one, and I loved it. This is the one that made it all fun. After 5 years of study, I still enjoy thumbing through it.

The accompanying tape is just OK, but good for gaining elementary oral fluency. I believe the pronuciation presented here is not generally considered correct but is still the pedagogical standard.

I studied the first edition of this book perhaps 10 years after I graduated from college, and I found the pedagogy was far superior to the language learning methods we had used in school.

On the very first reading of this book you should be able to recognize some words. The method immerses you immediately into the language before you even have memorized the alphabet! It gives you a few letters and you are already reading sounds with just those letters. Then it reinforces what you have just learned through repetition and adds a little bit more. The immediate and continued rapid progress will keep the student interested and will help him to stick with it. For beginning students, this is the book to have.

This is the best language learning book I have ever used in my entire life, and I was a language major in College and I teach EFL for a living. This book is simply amazing, every single thing that can possibly be done right, is done right.

Because it's much easier to understand a language (passively or receptively) than to produce it (in conversational situations, for instance), learning Koine to the level of being able to read the NT is actually not as difficult as you might think.

After following Dobson's course of study, will you know Koine as well as a seminary student? No, but you will be able to read the NT on your own, provided you use an online concordance or a dictionary, plus a grammar book for the trickier parts.

The best part of this book are the insights that Dobson succinctly makes on the biblical texts that are being used. Since Dobson knows both Koine and Hebrew, he is able to show exactly what the authors were doing when writing the NT. Not only is this spiritually empowering, it also provides a background context for remembering the information being given.

In the new edition being sold on Amazon, there are accents. Also, there is an audio CD which complements the lessons nicely. This is the best value I seen in any product in quite a long time.

I've been teaching lay people (non-seminary setting) NT Greek for the last ten years and have tried four or five different first year grammars. John Dobson's Learn New Testament Greek has been unparalleled in its appeal and ease for getting into Greek. First of all, I really enjoyed working through the text myself! I've been reading the NT in Greek for nearly 30 years and have personally worked through just about everything out there. This grammar is fun! And it's translating well into the classroom setting. Normally by the sixth week of first year Greek, I've suffered a 30-40% attrition in class drop-outs because it was just too much. Not only have I not lost anyone in my current class of twelve, but we even picked up a few more after the first few weeks. Originally learning NT Greek in a very traditional manner with paradigms and cardboard sentences, I am loving the inductive approach and the sheer joy of hearing Greek that this course encourages. It's rejuvenated my own reading of the New Testament - I find I'm doing my readings aloud just for the fun of it and am experiencing the NT on a level that I didn't know existed. So, if you are new to Greek, give Dobson's book a try. If you've crashed and burned trying to learn Greek, perhaps several times - give Dobson a try. If you've been "buds" with Greek for a while - give yourself a refreshing Greek treat and work through this grammar...and then pass on the joy!

Please notice that the 3rd edition, the hardback (as of May, 2005), has accents. The 2nd edition has been very useful for me. I have made better progress with it than any other book I have used. But I wanted accents. I was ecstatic when I ran across a copy of the new edition and saw accent marks. I pretty much ignore them in writing, but I find them very helpful in reading. It makes it easier to remember the words when I am not making up the intonation each time I encounter them.

I pretty much agree with the gist of the other reviews. An excellent book which may not quite work for some person's learning styles. But give it a try. You may be one of the many for whom this style is idea.

Trying to learn greek on my own has meant years of frustration. Dobson's book has been the most user friendly way to learn that I have run across. Especially with the tape. It is still a great challenge to learn this language, but Dobson's method is very accessible.

I had known nothing about Greek before I picked up the book and started reading it, but within 30 mins, I had already memorized the alphabet, and was learning all kinds of words. The words you learn though are not in lists where you have to memorize them, he just puts them here and there in phrases and tells you what they mean. Within 3 days (30 mins a day) I was saying phrases and sentences, and within 15 days, I was reading paragraphs with ease. I've read many greek books, but this one tops them all with it's easy to learn style and it's fun way of learning. For learning Greek, Learn New Testament Greek was the best book I ever read.