Bob Nyberg
Posted: June 3rd, 2011, 3:02 pm
I took Greek at Prairie Bible College in 1975. In our first year of Greek we used New Testament Greek for Beginners by Machen. In second year Greek we used A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament by Dana and Mantey.
I can attest to the veracity of the old adage “use it or lose it!”
After graduating from Prairie I did not keep up on Greek and I lost it.
A couple years ago some people asked me to teach them Greek. We decided to use Basics of Biblical Greek by Mounce as our textbook and I tried to say one step ahead of my students. Thankfully, it was not like starting from scratch. I was surprised at how quickly things came together for me.
Since 1984, I have been teaching Phonetics and Language Acquisition Principles at the Missionary Training Center for New Tribes Mission. We use comprehension based language acquisition methods in our training program. I realized quickly that comprehension based language learning is light years ahead of the rote memorization of vocabulary and paradigms for learning Greek which we used at Prairie! I only wish that we would have had Dr. Randall Buth’s materials when trying to learn Greek back in the 1970’s!
As we worked through Mounce’s textbook, I was determined to apply some of the principles of comprehension based language learning to make it a bit easier to learn vocabulary and paradigms. In talking to the students, they seemed very encouraged in how much they were able to comprehend as we progressed from chapter to chapter.
Bob Nyberg
http://www.4himnet.com/bnyberg/Welcome.html
I can attest to the veracity of the old adage “use it or lose it!”
After graduating from Prairie I did not keep up on Greek and I lost it.
A couple years ago some people asked me to teach them Greek. We decided to use Basics of Biblical Greek by Mounce as our textbook and I tried to say one step ahead of my students. Thankfully, it was not like starting from scratch. I was surprised at how quickly things came together for me.
Since 1984, I have been teaching Phonetics and Language Acquisition Principles at the Missionary Training Center for New Tribes Mission. We use comprehension based language acquisition methods in our training program. I realized quickly that comprehension based language learning is light years ahead of the rote memorization of vocabulary and paradigms for learning Greek which we used at Prairie! I only wish that we would have had Dr. Randall Buth’s materials when trying to learn Greek back in the 1970’s!
As we worked through Mounce’s textbook, I was determined to apply some of the principles of comprehension based language learning to make it a bit easier to learn vocabulary and paradigms. In talking to the students, they seemed very encouraged in how much they were able to comprehend as we progressed from chapter to chapter.
Bob Nyberg
http://www.4himnet.com/bnyberg/Welcome.html