Learn New Testament Greek (Hardcover)

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.

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.