How to know when your seeing a Greek Grammar Rule

[LearningGreek]

Several times through Mounces Basics of Biblical Greek he will give many different ways things can be done in Greek.

For example, a neuter plural, or moving a word to the beginning of a sentence to show emphasis.

I am a slow learner so I am only doing one chapter a week (textbook, video lecture, memorization, and workbook for that chapter).

My concern is that when I get to the end (36 weeks total @ 1 chapter a week) I will forget all these nuanced rules.

Does anyone have any tips for how to remember these rules?

Are there any bible study aids that one can purchase to point out when the bible is doing something with the greek that has a significance to exegesis?

I am thinking about taking an online greek class after I finish the book maybe to help with this.

Thank you.

[Barry Hofstetter]

Build in a review cycle. Let's say for example that you are in chapter 5. quick review chapter's 1-4 (say 5 minutes, no more than 10) before you start your work on chapter 5. Do this every time you sit to work on the current chapter. When you complete chapter 5 and start chapter 6, wash, rinse repeat, in other words, spend the same amount of time reviewing chapters 1 through 5, and so on up until the time you hit the final chapter. Just do a quick read through of the grammar explanations at this point to save time (unless you want to add vocabulary as part of the review).

When you've completed your textbook and are ready to start reading actual text, using this review cycle will have prepared you to remember the nuances, but keep your beginning text nearby for reference. It's more important to actually read and internalize that the Greek at this point, which is really when you begin noticing the nuances and how they apply.

[Jonathan Robie]

Barry's advice is good.

I also think it's useful to have a resource or two that alert you to what is going on in the Greek text. Zerwick and Grosvenor is helpful:

https://www.amazon.com/Grammatical-Anal ... 8876535888

There are other books like this. And FWIW, you may well forget the names of the rules but still internalize them. Lots of reading in Greek is more important than memorizing all the rules.

[Stirling Bartholomew]

And FWIW, you may well forget the names of the rules but still internalize them. Lots of reading in Greek is more important than memorizing all the rules.

Which raises an important question for a beginner. Is there an alternative path to language competence which bypasses the rule learning activity and leads directly to internalizing the language?

[Barry Hofstetter]

And FWIW, you may well forget the names of the rules but still internalize them. Lots of reading in Greek is more important than memorizing all the rules.

Which raises an important question for a beginner. Is there an alternative path to language competence which bypasses the rule learning activity and leads directly to internalizing the language?

CI and TPRS and other "natural" language advocates will say yes. You can internalize a lot of structure through basically the "This is how you say it approach." But eventually knowing formal grammar helps a lot. I like Ørberg's approach in Lingua Latina, which includes large gobs of reading but still includes short sections on grammar. For Greek, the textbook Athenaze. Forget Mounce or any of the other specifically NT oriented beginning texts.

[Stirling Bartholomew]

Forget Mounce or any of the other specifically NT oriented beginning texts.

I haven't kept up with all the innovations in language pedagogy. It seems unfortunate that a student who just wants to read greek texts with comprehension is required to first become a grammarian and eventually to set aside all that and learn to read. Lots of wasted energy.

Postscript:
I was dabbling in Transformational Grammar when I first dusted off my copy of "The Language of the New Testament," Eugene Van Ness Goetchius. It was Goetchius framework that got me started learning the language. Analysis of syntax was the whole point of the project, not learning Greek. I had no burning desire to study ancient languages.

[Jonathan Robie]

And FWIW, you may well forget the names of the rules but still internalize them. Lots of reading in Greek is more important than memorizing all the rules.

Which raises an important question for a beginner. Is there an alternative path to language competence which bypasses the rule learning activity and leads directly to internalizing the language?

Internalizing is just another way of learning the rules - intuitively, more hands-on, responding to examples that illustrate the rules. Then it's helpful to learn the name of the rules you have learned to grasp. Living language approaches that carefully teach the rules of the language work well. If Alpha with Angela turns out to be as good as Aleph with Beth, it will be a great resource.

Asking and answering questions about a text in Greek, either in written or oral form, does a lot. Listening to Greek on the YouVersion app while reading the text does a lot.

[Shirley Rollinson]

Several times through Mounces Basics of Biblical Greek he will give many different ways things can be done in Greek.

For example, a neuter plural, or moving a word to the beginning of a sentence to show emphasis.

I am a slow learner so I am only doing one chapter a week (textbook, video lecture, memorization, and workbook for that chapter).

My concern is that when I get to the end (36 weeks total @ 1 chapter a week) I will forget all these nuanced rules.

Does anyone have any tips for how to remember these rules?

Are there any bible study aids that one can purchase to point out when the bible is doing something with the greek that has a significance to exegesis?

I am thinking about taking an online greek class after I finish the book maybe to help with this.

Thank you.

You're welcome to use the online Greek Textbook - I try to give fewer "rules" and more reading/writing/comprehension - and it's free
It starts at http://www.drshirley.org/greek/textbook02/index.html
Shirley Rollinson

[Daniel Semler]

Several times through Mounces Basics of Biblical Greek he will give many different ways things can be done in Greek.

For example, a neuter plural, or moving a word to the beginning of a sentence to show emphasis.

I am a slow learner so I am only doing one chapter a week (textbook, video lecture, memorization, and workbook for that chapter).

My concern is that when I get to the end (36 weeks total @ 1 chapter a week) I will forget all these nuanced rules.

Does anyone have any tips for how to remember these rules?

Are there any bible study aids that one can purchase to point out when the bible is doing something with the greek that has a significance to exegesis?

I am thinking about taking an online greek class after I finish the book maybe to help with this.

Thank you.

First of all, studying a chapter a week working on your own isn't really slow. Or at least I didn't feel it was when I did it.
Secondly, the beauty of Mounce I feel now is the morphology and basic syntax. But the limitation is that it is only oriented toward the NT. In the years since I used Mounce to get my basics of Ancient Greek in the NT form I have come to think more and more that it was not the right place to start. I should have studied Attic as Barry suggests. I am now trying to read my way out of NT Greek.

Forget Mounce or any of the other specifically NT oriented beginning texts.

I asked recently on one list about the existence of a true Koine grammar, and it was aimed precisely at this point. So to me Attic makes sense as no such thing really exists that I know of.

On the CI, TPRS front, yes - these are great. I like the BLC approach which introduces the grammar as you go along which works well. So if you are looking for a class in the vein theirs are very good in my opinion.

Regarding being a grammarian - yeah that's a problem. The way I tackled that in the end was to read grammar when I hit a problem and read Greek otherwise. I stopped reading grammars to try to memorize everything at one point quite deliberately. You need to get morphology down - Mounce is good at that so long as you don't need the optative but you'll want it eventually. Then you need enough syntax not to be completely lost. Then you read as much as you can and refer the grammars as you need. The trick is getting a decent set of things to read. But there are graded readers and people will tell you which books of the NT are easier to deal with, which bits of Koine to tackle or of the LXX and so on.

I like Barry's suggestion of how to get the nuances down, but honestly the way I remember these things best is by running into them in the wild so to speak. And yes you and up looking up stuff but there you go.

There are other books like this. And FWIW, you may well forget the names of the rules but still internalize them. Lots of reading in Greek is more important than memorizing all the rules.

I agree with this - much better to know what the construction means and and to recognize it in the wild than to be able to name it.

Thx
D