Customer Reviews

A New Testament Greek Primer

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
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I am completing lesson 27 in this book and have been frustrated with it from lesson 2. I have referenced Bill Mounce's book/workbook/cd from time to time during the course in order to clarify what in the world Baugh is talking about and I have frequently wished that I could have used his format (with its deficiencies) instead.

First of all, I do in fact like the way this book is arranged over that of Mounce. He introduces verbs in lesson 5 and that way the student can begin to read Greek much earlier in the course than with Mounce. This is about the only positive thing I have to say about this primer.

Critique
1) It constantly seems that Baugh has fellow Greek teachers in mind rather than the basic student in that he consistently clouds simple concepts with lengthy discussion of the finer and rarer points of Greek that no introductory student could be expected to understand or remember. My professor was regularly saying, "I know what Baugh is saying, and technically he is correct, but that is confusing for your level of proficiency."
2) The way the lessons themselves are organized is confusing. The paradigms are listed first, with no explanation, and then they are "explained" in paragraph form rather than graphically or spacially...or simply. Remember also that these paragraphs are riddled with the intricacies of the paradigm and the Greek language rather than with help demonstrating to the reader how to take what they already have learned and apply this new info.
3) He assumes the student has a significant understanding of English grammar and grammatical terms - pronomial, predicate nominative, etc.
4) While he overexplains the complex things, the necessary and basic concepts or lists in his book receive inadequate treatment. For example, under adjectives, he goes on and on about adj's in the attributive, substantive, and predicate position to the point of utter confusion but nowhere that I can find does he list the simple translation tool that attributives have an article and noun, substantive have and article an no noun, and predicates don't have an article. Simple, and simply missing from Baugh.
5) As all the other critical reviewers have indicated, he constantly uses study guide questions that contain words and concepts that the student hasn't been exposed to. This is understandable in the first few chapters, but afterwards he shouldn't have to list 15-20 vocab words above the exercises.
6) He doesn't explain the answers in the answer key but simply lists the correct answer.
7) He frequently uses alternative translations of texts in the exercises so that Bible software is useless in helping the student to determine why they got a particular question wrong.

All in all, this primer seems like an untested first draft. Even though there are many things I do not like about Mounce's approach, he is simple and straightforward and has a way of making complex things understandable rather than how Baugh tends to make the most basic things quite confusing.

but I can't. This beginner level Grammar of NT Greek is a very fine effort in certain ways that are important. But as I labored through it as part of my seminary curriculum, I simply found too many things about it that were downright distressing, thus the mixed review I'm giving it.

On the positive side, this Greek Grammar workbook is quite thorough for a beginner level grammar. Those wanting the basics of NT Greek will find that Baugh covers a surprisingly comprehensive array of topics and principles that are really quite essential. He appropriately breaks from Metzger in focusing the beginner level student on more reasonable levels of vocabulary memorization that provide far more 'bang for the buck' then Metzger's approach. In addition, he covers nouns up through the third declension, including prominent exceptions, as well as verbs and participles of multiple tenses, voices, and moods. While I will heavily criticize his workbook exercises later, it should be noted that the answer key for the exercises is needed and does allow the student, depending on his/her aptitude, to independently work through his Grammar. Also, his glossary of many grammatical terms is also a welcome part of this Grammar, particularly those who struggle with grammatical terminology in English (ie: what is a 'predicate nominative'). This glossary will help in that regard, and this is important since such grammatical terms are used with regularity in this Grammar, as they should be.

Now for the negatives. Baugh's thoroughness on balance is good but he does at times devote too much ink to peripheral and decidedly secondary concepts that too often fog up his book. And this really comes through when Baugh attempts to present more complex areas such as participles and even adjectives or pronouns. There are much easier ways to effectively teach participles, contract verbs, adjectives, and irregular aorist forms then what we see from Baugh here. Participles and irregular aorists in particular are difficult enough on their own without Baugh making them more confusing, often unnecessarily. And this leads to my last major problem with the book - its completely unnecessary introduction of arbitrary difficulties into the workbook exercises. With aggravating regularity, Baugh pollutes his workbook exercises either with vocabulary words that haven't been taught yet, concepts that haven't been introduced yet, and in unnecessarily emphasizing minute points (usually without explanatory resolution based on what the student should know from the applicable lesson) that in many cases are purely academic and matters of translation philosophy rather then basic issues of grammar. I understand that there is a certain teaching philosophy that believes that these forms of instructional 'sneak attacks' serve the noble purpose of stretching the student which is supposed to lead to increased inquisitiveness and the like. Well, as a student trying to learn a completely new language, Greek (like English) has plenty of built-in irregularities and oddities to keep students on their heals without Baugh's help. The level of confusion he unnecessarily introduces into the workbook exercises goes a long way towards making his Grammar inaccessible and unhelpful to those who are unfortunate enough to not be studying under a good professor who can compensate.

This Grammar had the potential of being truly great. It is thorough and carries with it the great potential of instilling a very good foundation for more advanced study and literacy of NT Greek. Unfortunately, if Baugh's book is any indication of the effectiveness of traditional forms of teaching NT Greek, it is little wonder why so few have achieved a genuine level of competence in interacting with the language. And such a result is very sad indeed since God chose this language as the tool to communicate his special revelation starting with the Gospels.

I have been a student of New Testament Greek for a couple years now and I originally learned my grammar on William Mounce's The Basics of Biblical Greek. I really liked Mounce's book and I learned well form it. As a refresher, I picked up Baugh's Primer. If any Greek grammar tops Mounce, this is the one.

It goes in easy to swallow chunks and splits grammar up into 30 helpful, but not overly difficult chapters. Just like Mounce, it uses words that occur 50+ times in the NT in its vocabulary lists. It has strong sections in Morphology and the paradigms that you memorize are incredibly helpful. Also, like Mounce, Baugh uses actual Scripture passages from the Greek NT for practice.

The big advantages of this Primer over Mounce's Basics, is that this book integrates the verb system as you go along. It does not wait until after you have learned everything else and then concentrate on verbs. I think this helps the verb system to sink in a little better.

Also, another advantage is that this book is CHEAPER. It does not require both a text and a workbook like Mounce, but is all rolled into one. I definitely think that anyone who is looking to buy a book on NT Greek grammar should buy this one.

A New Testament Greek Primer has proven an excellent workbook style text for my beginning Greek students in Japan. Best features: 1. Distinguishes between memory paragdigms (must memorize) and recognition paradigms. 2. Chooses vocabulary based on NT frequency data.
3. Uses only NT material for translation exercises, thus avoiding artificial constructions and strange Greek style.
4. Morphological and grammatical explanations very clear, building on similar phenomena in English. 5. Homework in workbook varied; thorough drill on requisite skills before moving ahead. Incremental step by step procedure.
Worst feature: pushes students to apply knowledge to vocabulary they have not learned yet; this may be sound pedagogy but a little too much and the "unknown" words are often not in the dictionary in the back of the book.

First, let me thank the reviewers who have taken the time to note their concerns and appreciation for my Primer. I hope to complete a revised manuscript of the Primer in mid-2008 and many of the weaknesses of the work that have been pointed out will be fixed. I hope so anyway!

Let me say as background that this book was primarily written for our intensive five week introductory Greek class here at Westminster Seminary California. Our previous text by J. G. Machen had gone up to $53.00 in the early 1990s which motivated me to start this grammar--which was six years in development by the way. Bill Mounce and I were working on NT Greek grammars at the same time but unknown to each other.

Some of the things in the Primer were the result of my own language learning experience (including classical Greek using a dreadful little grammar), language teaching experience (almost 25 years now), and from research into teaching foreign languages for reading knowledge. I was experimenting a bit with the Primer, though not always successfully. I hope to fix these problems and make a better work that will be useful for the variety of classes and students who use the Primer around the world.

Thanks again faithful Greeks!

S. M. Baugh, Ph.D.
Professor of New Testament
Westminster Seminary California

If you're considering this book for self-study (i.e., unless it's an assigned text for a course), keep looking because this one may really hinder and frustrate you in learning Greek. Its problems are not only with its content but with the physical construction of the book itself.

The Primer is supposed to be used as a workbook as evidenced by the format of many of the exercises (the "circle this" and "underline that" variety), and the fact that the book is pre-punched to fit in a three-ring binder. That's all very fine and good except with just a month's heavy use, the binding falls apart and you'll have individual pages coming detached from the rest; if you want to take the whole thing apart to put in a binder, you will find that the glue is just strong enough that you'll rip and mangle more than a few pages in the process. In addition to this, there just isn't enough room to perform the translation exercises in the workbook unless you can write very small and legibly, so part of the exercises will be in the workbook and the other part you will have to do on other paper.

As for problems with the content:

First, when Baugh uses Greek sentences to illustrate points of grammar, he very often uses both vocabulary and word forms that haven't yet been learned. So, the beginning student really cannot understand the example sentences in the early lessons until he has nearly completed the course. This greatly hinders the student's ability to understand the point (since he doesn't have a comprehensible example), and causes a lot of frustration and self-doubt ("Have I forgotten this? Did I somehow miss this word in the vocabulary? Why doesn't this make sense to me???") It's only now that I'm reviewing for my final exam that I understand many of the early examples! I'm reading through chapter 10 (adjectives), and one example sentence uses a third-declesion noun (chapter 11) and an infinitive (chapter 25) plus two vocabulary words that aren't learned until chapters 11 and 20. There are only five words in the sentence!

Second, Baugh only uses actual Scripture in the translation exercises. While I can understand why this might seem desirable, it turns into a conscious or unconscious crutch for students who know the English Bible. J. Gresham Machen's ("New Testament Greek for Beginners") approach of using Scripture-like language-but without using Scripture itself-is to be preferred, because it forces the student to rely on basic parsing techniques to translate rather than some combination of parsing and unintended recall of familiar English Scripture passages.

Even though I've had only bad things to say about the book, now that I've finished the course, I'm quite comfortable reading New Testament Greek, so it can't be all bad! But, I was assigned this as a text for a seminary Beginning Greek class, so I also had the benefit of excellent classroom instruction and peer interaction. So, if you're a seminary student assigned this book, now you know what to expect. If you're a self-study student, keep looking-there must be something better!

I teach Greek at a Christian liberal arts college. When I was first hired for the job, the school was using another contemporary textbook, and requested that I continue using that text. However, I quickly learned that most students were discouraged and intimidated by the abundance of advanced information involved in the explanation of Greek grammar. For the students who struggled the most, and were falling behind, I provided my copy of S.M. Baugh's "A New Testament Greek Primer." To a student, they came back to me confident that they could succeed at Greek.

Consequently, I convinced the school to switch to Baugh's "Primer," and my students love it! As a professor, I think Baugh has provided just the right amount of explanation in the book, leaving me opportunity to expand on certain features in class. Though all Greek students grumble about parsing, I am pleased with the amount of parsing required in the "Primer." I have seen better Greek comprehension as a result of my students' parsing practice. Baugh also helps the student of New Testament Greek by pointing out, from time to time, that students need not be concerned about certain forms (cf. Chs. 18 and 30) because they simply never occur in the New Testament. He also helpfully distinguishes between "Memory" and "Recognition" Paradigms. I cannot recommend this textbook highly enough! My students agree:

"The main reason I prefer S.M. Baugh's Greek Primer to [the other textbook] is that it is more accessible and user friendly for the beginning Greek student. The chapters are shorter, it's easier to read, and there are more practice pages. The paradigms are larger and easier to understand. The practice assignments in the book do not just go over parsing and translation, but word recognition and pronunciations. I like how the chapters integrate nouns and verbs more evenly, giving you a chance to cement one verb form in your head before moving on the the next. It doesn't overload you with all of the verb forms or nouns at one time.
This sounds pretty silly, but even the way the author gives handwritten examples of the Greek alphabet next to the printed version helped me memorize the alphabet. In [the other textbook] I have to weed through a massive amount of information just to get to the basics of a chapter. A lot of times, [it] will include information that isn't relevant or necessary for a beginner to know. It's too much. Baugh, on the other hand, lets you know if a paradigm should be memorized right away, or if you just need to recognize it. He also puts all the vocab. words at the beginning, which I like, so that when he talks about a specific word in the lesson, you know what he is referring to. Also, he gives you ways to help memorize the vocabulary, putting them in groups like "emotions" or "things Jesus did." This is a REALLY useful technique."

Another students says:

"...I found [the other textbook] to be hard to understand many of the Greek concepts. As I was struggling through Professor Caughey recommended that I put some extra time into my Greek practices. For the extra practice Professor Caughey gave me work sheets from "A New Testament Greek Primer" by S.M. Baugh. I had trouble in the following areas:
Understanding the broad curriculum
Excess information
Finding enough practice
It was with the help of Baugh's book that I gained a better understanding of each of these concepts. One of my favorite things about Baugh over [the other textbook] is that Baugh gets to the point quickly. His chapters are shorter but not lacking in information. He sets up each chapter beginning with the week's vocabulary and a series of paradigms which are helpful in memorizing. Next are some that you simply need to recognize, not memorize. He then explains what changes we might encounter, jumps into the usage, adds a little bit of additional information that usually deals with odds and ends of translating and finally he has about three pages devoted to practicing. His practice worksheets not only include parsing and translation but other exercises that help recognizing moods, lexical forms, and reading helps. There is a variety used in his teaching that allows the student to learn better. That is one draw back to [the other textbook]. All [its] work consists of parsing and translating. Baugh presents the information in a clear and concise manner where [the other] tends to give you extra information.
Some ways [it] does this is by including small tid-bits that can be interesting but overall they tend to be confusing and pointless. More specifically this week we were learning about the Subjunctive mood in [the other textbook]... it mentions that some conditional sentences are classified as 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th class. There was nothing more said about classes or what information goes into a class. I have trouble with this simply because while taking on a new language it seems that everything presented is of major importance and more often than not I found myself trying to remember everything and becoming easily discouraged... [The other textbook] is not incompetent nor do I regret learning from [it], I simply find the breakdown of Baugh easier to understand and highly recommend it to all who are attempting to learn Greek."

Baugh's grammar is good, but this must be the worst edited book I've ever seen. His editor should have lost his job after this was published. My Greek professor was always correcting errors, including incorrect breathing marks, wrong articles, wrong endings, wrong answers in the back of the book, and even problems with English grammar. The answers for translation exercises follow some Bible translation rather than following the glosses provided by Baugh, which means the answers are often different than what you will get even if you correctly translate the sentences based on the information you've been provided. While he provides a list of words not yet learned for all his translation exercises, he often leaves words out! THIS BOOK SHOULD NEVER BE USED FOR SELF STUDY! You will need someone to guide you through all of the poor editing mistakes.

I have used this book both in my own learning and in teaching NT greek. I found it helpful and useful in avoiding many issues that are not central to learning the language (one thinks fo the two or three chapters in Machen's book dedicated to accents). Baugh's division of chapters as well as his organization of vocabulary is well thought out and a benefit to those who might easily become overwhelmed by language study. The most problematic issue with the book falls in the translation practice. All of the practice examples are bible verses (a common thread in most Greek primers) which creates issues on two fronts: 1) Well known verses do not require you to know Greek to translate them, and 2) There are many practice examples in which vocabulary is used which the student has not yet learned and some which is not present even in the glossary at the end of the book. All of that being said I still recommend this book and will continue to use it in the future.