Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar by William D. Mounce
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Book Reviews of Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar
Book Review: The Best in Class
Summary: 5 Stars
The entire study package of Basics of Biblical Greek which includes the textbook, the study guide, the vocabulary cards, the summary sheet, and the lecture CD's is a blessed fruit of a long, thoughtful, meticulous, and high-tech labor of one of the world's best New Testament Greek scholars. I have to admit I have not studied Greek from other professors, but after studying Mounce, I simply can not imagine a better way to teach students an introduction to Biblical Greek than the one Prof. Mounce implements in this study packet. The structure and methodology are so impressively organized that I believe, without trying to diminish the role of an instructor, one can study by himself or herself without taking the class at a seminary. From start to finish, Prof. Mounce designs the lessons with solid exegesis skills as the goal in mind. He wastes no time but immediately exposes students with translation exercises using real Scripture passages in the study guide, even early in the first few chapters when he barely starts with nouns.
The lessons are divided into three major parts; nouns, adjectives and verbs. Each chapter begins with exegetical insights related to the topic being taught in that particular chapter. He then moves on by explaining the English and Greek forms. The nouns and adjectives are not too bad. They are usually divided into three types of declensions. While the nouns usually take on one of the three declensions, the most common configuration of adjectives is either 3-1-3 or 2-1-2 where the first, second and third numbers indicate the declension type for masculine, feminine and neuter genders, respectively. There are some discussions on special-case nouns having slightly abnormal endings; pant and ent, for examples. Now verbs are considerably more challenging because they not only have more numerous categories and rules, but the biggest obstacles are the tense stems and when they form the real verbs through a combination of augments, tense-formatives, connecting vowels, and personal endings. The trouble can be illustrated by comparing it to having to memorize the English present, past and perfect tenses of irregular and regular verbs which the Greek version has six; present, future active, aorist active and passive, perfect active and passive, instead of three in English. And each of these six stems has different forms not only depending on the person and number, but also on the voices; active, middle, and passive. On top of these, there is another parameter, called aspect, where these verbs take on other forms, the indicative covered in the early chapters of the verbs, subjunctive, infinitive and imperative. Some are similar if not the same as the indicatives, which make them even harder to distinguish which one is which. Here Prof. Mounce reminds students to always watch for the contexts. Context is your best friend when it comes to translation. There is no easy way of getting around this issue completely except in my view, to get the Greek Morphology text, also by Mounce. At the end of some chapters, there is coverage on extended materials that deal with special cases, additional rules in translation, contraction and morphology.
The summary sheet consists of all important rules involving word formation, verb-ending charts, and all the forms of frequently used verbs. It serves as a handy guide for students when doing the translation so they don't have to flip through the pages of the textbook. Some flipping of pages is inevitable, though, because the last few pages of the textbook has the list of major lexicons.
There are two types of drills in the study guide. The first is chapter-by-chapter review where students are asked to parse ten words in a table having the forms that have been covered up to that chapter. Next, there is a warm-up translation section consisting of seven short phrases or sentences to be translated before the real translation exercise begins with twenty sentences; some are long ones. From my experience, I sometimes had a headache after completing the translation work due to the intensity it involves in figuring out not only what the words mean, but also their forms, and how to restructure the sentence in English format that both are understandable and make sense. The second type of drill is the exam-type where the test materials are combined every five chapters. The tasks include parsing, grammar rules, and translations usually from a New Testament passage.
As in any other languages, learning Greek requires extra memory power, but not brute-force memorization of every single word indiscriminately. Prof. Mounce always warns students only to memorize special-case words and rules such as endings and contractions, instead of every single word with all its garden variety of forms. Excellent advice.
Needless to say, I delightfully endorse Prof. Mounce as your virtual Greek instructor. If you decide to homeschool yourself, you can purchase the complete combo set at teknia dot com. I don't think Amazon sell the lecture CD set. But even if you are taking the class at the seminary, I don't see any harm for you to buy the combo set anyway, though you probably won't need the lecture CD's provided you have an excellent instructor.
Book Review: Perfect NT Greek grammar for the self-learner
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent NT Greek grammar. Unlike some Greek grammars (notably Hansen and Quinn's Attic grammar, one I have experience with), this is ideally suited for the self-learner. Here's why:- Mounce tries to minimize the amount of memorization required. Greek is a difficult language, no two ways about it: but the way the material is presented can make learning easier or harder. For those of us who come at it as adults, memorization is difficult. Some grammars require massive amounts of rote memorization; Mounce takes instead the tack of giving you a number of rules to apply, then only requiring memorization where the rules don't apply. Using this method, the amount of memorization is cut dramatically, and the effort required is reduced accordingly.
- To ease the remaining memorization, Mounce includes lots of good vocabulary helps. Unfortunately, vocabulary acquisition is usually another rote memorization affair. Mounce includes either derivations or cognates in other languages (drawing in some cases on Metzger's "Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek"), or silly little memorization aids. An example of the latter is Mounce's memorable word play on the word ELPIS (="hope"): "Some people HOPE that ELVIS did not die." I think I can safely say I will never forget the meaning of ELPIS.
- In many ways (including the previous two items) Mounce includes the fruit of his years of experience as a teacher of New Testament Greek. Many books that I'm sure would be just fine when learning from a professor completely fall apart when an autodidact (like myself) attempts to use them. With this book, it's almost as good as Mounce being right there.
- Although I would not have believed it, Mounce has successfully integrated devotional sections at the beginning of most chapters. A combination textbook/devotional? Yes, believe it or not. The section for chapter 10, for example, is simply amazing - building off John 1:14, KAI hO LOGOS SARX EGENETO ("And the Word became flesh.") This answers another big problem for autodidacts, which is that you don't have much of an inducement to continue when the going gets tough. These devotional sections (I am assuming a Christian student, of course) add greatly to your experience and make you look forward to new chapters.
The end result is that this book makes it possible to learn New Testament Greek on your own to just about the same depth as you would get at a seminary. That's an amazing feat in itself.
But be aware, this book has no exercises in it. Rather, you need to buy the companion workbook, which has all the exercises.
Book Review: Great book, but 3rd edition now available
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the best beginning Biblical Greek grammar available today, but it is not the newest edition.
After introducing the Greek alphabet and word structure, Mounce helps students gain a solid control of Greek nouns (ch. 5-14). He then moves on to indicative mood verbs (chs. 15-25) followed by participles, non-indicative mood, and other troublesome verbs (chs. 26-35). The appendix itself, full of charts and paradigms, is worth its weight in gold.
I'm currently teaching a beginning Greek class with 15 lay people at our church using this 2nd edition textbook. Mounce is such a clear teacher that any student with enough self-discipline could actually teach himself the language. Using Mounce's Greek workbook (sold separately), you can practice exercises that reinforce each chapter. The author also provides an alternate track for those who want to introduce verbs earlier in the learning process. Other benefits include a CD-ROM, links to his website, and cross references to Mounce's Morphology book and Wallace's intermediate Grammar for those who want to dig deeper into the language. If there are any drawbacks, it would be an underemphasis on accenting and linguistics.
Please note: there is now a third edition of this text available as of December 2009. The third edition employs more white space, new pictures, color shades, and dimensions that are about 30% larger. It now looks more like a Jr. high language textbook. The new textbook also has the benefit of laying open flat on your desk without pages being tempted to flip closed. Apart from the new "look" and a few new features, content in the 3rd edition is largely unchanged from this second edition.
Book Review: Most spectacular grammar text ever.
Summary: 5 Stars
As a student, I have to say that this grammar is categorically the best textbook I have ever encountered on any subject, bar none. The presentation of the material is clear and the explanations lucid. The order of the material is carefully considered. The whole didactic approach, of setting out general rules and illustrating them with examples, is one that works very well. The footnotes are very helpful, including in many cases finer points of background information (e.g., from morphology) that allow the student to understand why things are the way they are, which makes them much easier to remember. The lexicon in the back is good. (It's not a substitute for the big Danker lexicon, but nothing crammed into the back of a textbook could be.) The index is very good. Even the appendices are genuinely useful.
Learning a language necessarily entails a significant amount of study, so I hesitate to call learning Greek "easy", but this book certainly makes it much easier than it would otherwise be and a pleasure. You will not regret the money you spend on this book. Even if you use another grammar in class, get this one too.
The workbook also is unusually good.
I said that I used this book as a student. More recently, I have now used it to help other students through learning Greek. They tell me I'm a great Greek teacher, but it's the textbook that's great. With this text, the course practically teaches itself.
Book Review: An outstanding learning tool
Summary: 5 Stars
If you've read "Greek for the Rest of Us" by William Mounce and decided that you really wanted to learn the basics of Biblical Greek including vocabulary then this is the book that you will want. William Mounce has a gift for taking the Greek language and making it approachable even to those who have tried before but not succeeded in learning Biblical Greek. While there are many, many grammar details to learn such as whether something is dative, nominative, accusative, genitive, active, passive, dependent, independent, etc. Mr. Mounce actually makes it interesting and finds ways to keep the student interested and feeling positive about their progress. All those grammar rules are very important in correctly interpreting the Greek texts and in understanding English translation. Sometimes there is no English equivalent for a Greek word, sometimes we can only approach a correct translation by approximating a similar word in English, but then our personal prejudices and beliefs affect the word that we choose. Understanding Greek is important to a serious level of study of New Testament writings. This book gives you the basic ability to look through a Greek text or Interlinear Translation of the Bible and understand not only what is said, but also what is actually meant but the text. This is a very highly recommended text for anyone desiring to learn Biblical Greek and one of the best books on the subject that I have ever read.