Product Description

The best-selling and most widely accepted New Testament Greek textbook has just gotten better. The author has made the book more user-friendly and offers options to professors, particularly enabling them to introduce Greek verbs earlier as well as offering some made-up sentences to challenge the students.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5637 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

From the Back Cover
New, updated editions of the best-selling and most widely accepted textbook and workbook for learning biblical Greek
William D. Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar and its companion tool Basics of Biblical Greek Workbook are by far the best-selling and most widely accepted textbooks for learning New Testament Greek.
These excellent tools for studying New Testament Greek are now even better. As a result of feedback from professors, the author has made adjustments to his material. For example, a chapter on clauses has been added at the end of the book. The CD-ROM is now easier to use and has even more information on it than the earlier edition. The workbook has been significantly rewritten. Nearly 50 percent of the verses are new. They are shorter and more focused on the grammar of the chapter.
Features include:
- Best-selling Greek language textbook
- Changes from the first edition made in response to ten years of use
- Grammar’s CD-ROM is easier to navigate and now includes short audio summary lectures (7-9 minutes)
- An appendix in the Grammar allows professors to introduce verbs earlier in the course
- Two tracks in the workbook: track one allows you to go through the book in the normal order. Track two has totally different exercises that allow you to teach verbs earlier.
- Workbook has 3-hole, perforated pages

About the Author
William D. Mounce (PhD, Aberdeen University) lives as a writer in Spokane, Washington. He is the president of Biblical Training, a non-profit organization offering the finest in evangelical teaching to the world for free. See BillMounce.com for more information. Formerly he was the preaching pastor at a church in Spokane, and prior to that a professor of New Testament and director of the Greek program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is the author of the bestselling New Testament Greek resources, Basics of Biblical Greek, and served as the New Testament chair of the English Standard Version translation of the Bible.

Customer Reviews

Solid if not earthshattering...
I am not a Greek scholar. I am not a Greek grammar enthusiast. I am merely a seminary student plowing my way through beginning Greek grammar, and this was the textbook assigned to my first two classes. I have used no other Greek grammar resources, so I have no point of comparison.

My impressions of this textbook are mostly positive. Mounce seems to do his best to make the complexities of Greek grammar accessible to the beginning student, and he effectively uses non-technical language to that end. I was periodically irritated by his sometimes rather lame attempts at humor, but even those reflected his heart to connect with his readers. His passion for the Greek language and its potential for application in the lives of beginning Greek students is apparent.

The book is generally well organized and rather systematic, which is helpful for those of us who like process and order and repetition. One minor complaint is the amount of "optional" advanced information that is included in footnotes and appendices. Though some of this information was not essential, we regularly stumbled upon stuff in the footnotes that was seemingly vital to really understanding some of the material. It was difficult to determine which of the additional information was "skippable" and which was essential.

Overall, I think that this textbook did a commendable job of introducing me to the basics of Greek grammar. This process was not especially fun for me, but that is my own personal disconnect with language acquisition. In any case, I am happy to recommend Mounce's text as a good tool for beginning Greek students to use to begin to learn the language. If you do use this text, make sure to use the acccompanying workbook and vocabulary cards.

The Best in Class
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.

A must have for anyone learning Greek at home
Recently I decided to teach myself Greek. I've attempted it before using other grammars without much success. The main stumbling block for me was that other authors assumed I knew what sujective case or nominative predicate meant. I didn't, but Mounce gives the reader a crash course in English grammar along with the Greek lessons. Learning has actually turned out to be fun and easy! I simply cannot recommend this text highly enough.

The workbook, flash cards and vocabulary CD are great adjuncts to the text.