As I mentioned, at the moment I am learning NT Greek, having been told to get cracking on it before arriving at college. For various reasons I'd been putting this off, so I am still at the stage of very simple sentences. Most of the examples and exercises in the textbook (Duff's Elements of New Testament Greek) are - not unreasonably - drawn from the Bible, which means that you get a lot of useful Scriptural vocabulary. It also gives them a rather pious flavour - the crowds see the angels, the brothers untie the slaves (for some reason the first verb you learn is "to untie"), the Lord Christ frees people, etc.
However, one sentence that came up recently was "They are throwing bread."
Shades of Bertie Wooster and the Drones Club!
I must admit it makes a pleasant change from wall-to-wall stained glass.
so I am massively out of date on seeing your blog, but I can tell you the reason that λυω is the first verb you learn - a) it's one of the few verbs in Greek that is fairly regular and b) it's always the one that people start with! :)
ReplyDeleteYes, someone cheerfully said "oh, λυω is the only regular verb." Which I took as an exaggeration, but only a very slight one!
ReplyDeleteAnyway I quite approve of starting with random verbs, though the exercises in Duff were all quite pious and dull. Apparently the one in the previous textbook were more fun and involved lots of people being tied and untied to trees...
Greek continues to defeat me, though.
At New College we used "A New Testament Greek Primer" by Baugh, which was quite accessible. However, I don't think it could be described as entertaining! And for 'cheating', i.e. looking up every word in the NT in every form, I found "The New Analytical Greek Lexicon" by Perschbacher, to be a great help!
ReplyDelete@Stewart - thank you for the tip with Perschbacher. I'm also going to try and get a hold of Wenham (which was the forerunner to Duff) as one of my problems with Duff is that he puts all the information in massive sections, and Wenham apparently takes a more bite-sized chunks approach.
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