Biblical Greek (Zondervan Get an A! Study Guides) - Books

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
This series of laminated sheets enables students and pastors to see critical material at a glance and serves them well as they review for tests, for comprehensive exams, and for later on in life.

Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Excellent reference tool September 7, 2008
I am a student in intermediate Greek, and I frequently use this review sheet to remind myself of key concepts when I am translating passages. I find it extremely helpful, and would easily recommend it for anyone studying the Greek language.

5 out of 5 stars

The Best in Class July 9, 2008
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 advise.

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.

4 out of 5 stars

Handy "cheat sheet".... May 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I have found this to be a handy help with Koine Greek. It contains a great deal of useful information in a sturdy, durable folder. It fits quite well into the front or back of a three ring binder along with one's class notes. The font is small and crowded, but, afterall, this is a "cheat sheet". Generally, I think it is safe to say that this guide has most of the things that one might need help with as a student.

5 out of 5 stars

Nice to have... April 9, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I have found this little cheat sheet very helpful. As one reviewer mentioned, its not a must have, but it is certainly nice to have. Wile learning another language, it is nice to have a quick reference guide readily available instead of thumbing through your textbook. If you are just learning Greek, you could certainly live without this chart, but its cheep and personally has helped me.

1 out of 5 stars

Not a must have January 29, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

It is a handy tool for reviewing, but you don't have to buy it. As he/she make progress through the first year of Greek class, one can make his own review or cheat sheets, more through than this one, focusing on the issues he/she need to learn better. Not to mention the reviewing and the systematizing work itself that can provide a great help in order to organize the Greek grammar knowledge in one's mind (using different colors and highlights, tips and tricks, and so on).

You can spend your money more wisely by buying Mounce's BBG vocabulary cards, which are really helpful (unless you decide to make your own cards...)

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