Mastering New Testament Greek Vocabulary Through Semantic Domains (Paperback)

by Mark Wilson (Author), Jason Oden (Author)
Key Phrases: semantic domains, Units of Time, Duration of Time, Features of Objects (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Mark Wilson introduces Greek students to a method widely used today in general language learning—semantic domains, or categories.

From the Back Cover

Basic to learning New Testament Greek is acquiring an adequate vocabulary. Mark Wilson introduces Greek students to a method widely used in general language learning—semantic domains. Wilson arranges Greek words in the ninety-three categories of Louw and Nida’s Greek-English Lexicon and includes frequency counts for every Greek word.

"Mark Wilson has built on Louw and Nida's work, capitalizing on the association of terms within their semantic domains for the acquisition of vocabulary. What a great idea! This should be a very helpful tool for students moving beyond the basic building blocks toward reading proficiency."

—George H. Guthrie, Benjamin W. Perry Professor of Bible
Union University

“I highly recommend this book to all students as a helpful guide to learning the vocabulary of the Greek New Testament and as a supplement to [Louw and Nida.]”

—David Alan Black
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

“This is a book to be warmly commended and heavily used. I think it will greatly reduce the fear of vocabulary study that some students develop because of the previous lack of just this kind of learning aid.”

—Robert W. Yarbrough
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Mark Wilson (D.Litt. et. Phil., University of South Africa) is the director of the Seven Churches Network. He is an adjunct professor of New Testament at Regent University and has taught biblical Greek at Oral Roberts University. He has edited several of Sir William Ramsay’s works, including the full-color revision and update of St. Paul the Traveler and Roman Citizen.

Jason Oden served as Mark Wilson's research assistant at Oral Roberts University and is now a M.A. student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Kregel Academic & Professional; Bilingual edition (January 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0825441153
• ISBN-13: 978-0825441158
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,021,124 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Semantic Domains 'Dictionary', February 24, 2009

By	Zone-One (Altoona, PA) - See all my reviews

Semantic domains aid in understanding the different cognate greek words forms, and knowing the linguistic features of similar meaning words aid in scriptural interpretation.

This book follows the same order of the Semantic Domains Lexicon by Louw and Nida. Being a compact ready reference makes this easy to carrying around.

I also have the Semantic Domains Lexicon, both these are excellent.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent way to improve vocabulary, June 16, 2008

By	Bert Krages (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book organizes words according to their semantic domains and thus allows you to build competence by learning substantially all the terms associated with a particular category of words. I find it much easier to learn words in small groups that encompass a particular category because learning in this kind of context lets you see the similarity and contrasts between terms and genders. For example, learning the terms that describe people was helpful in that I could recognize those terms in a comprehensive way when reading materials (e.g, the words for man, old man, young man, woman, old woman, child, etc). The approach that works best for me it to select a particular category to review one day. The next day, I review that category again and add another category to review. Keep reviewing the categories until all the words in that category come readily to mind. The amount of time needed to review a category becomes less and less each day as your familiarity increases. There is no need or benefit to review the categories in the order presented in the book. I found that concentrating on frequency is counterproductive because learning vocabulary by semantic domains helps you develop a more intuitive sense for vocabulary which helps you to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words when reading texts. The same can be said of learning by cognate groups but I find it more satisfying to learn the terms by semantic groups because it gives me a better sense of the progress I have made towards learning the basic vocabulary.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars of limited value, December 15, 2006

By	Markos (Oklahoma) - See all my reviews

The idea behind this book may be a good one and certainly we all need more help in vocabulary acquisition. For most of us, long after we have pretty much mastered paradigms and syntax vocabulary still lags far behind, so I appreciate the effort.
As to whether reading vocabulary words clustered in groups of related meanings had any real advantage, I'll just have to take the author's word for it. It is nice to see how many synonyms appear in NT Greek, and the relative number of occurances of each word, but I just can't image this book being of any long term value, particularly when compared to Trenchard's masterpiece. I KNOW reading works grouped according to cognates helps.
The other big advantage of Trenchard's book (I know one is not meant to replace the other, but think about it; any time you spend with this book you could be spending with Trenchard, not to mention reading the NT itself!) is that Trenchard's section on cognates includes about 85% of NT words and his book as a whole includes 100%, whereas Wilson's book includes only 73%. That may not sound like a big difference, but of course for advanced learners, we want help learning ALL the words, most of all the rare ones which are hard to master.