How many have tried to learn Greek?

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Shakuhachi

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I have tried many times but get distracted with. Life and other interests even as my memory gets worse as I age… I am better with Latin but even that has diminished. If you dont practice this stuff daily you don’t get to keep it. Too much to memorize as far as grammer and vocabulary.

But I will try again.

I saw Clay Jenkinson of The Jefferson Hour. His final remark as Jefferson was that we shoul;d all learn Ancient Greek. Not very feasible. But a little Koine, at least for word study, is do-able.
 
Greek has never been on the list of languages that I’m interested in. I’m more interested in Latin, but that’s because it is the origin language of the Romance languages, which I am interested in (not that I invest much time in learning any).
 
We sure have the tools these days. All we need is time and perseverance.
 
I did Spanish in high school. I spent my first year of Latin declining my nouns with Spanish verb endings. 😛

Needless to say, it took me four semesters to get two semesters’ worth of Latin, and then they were only pity passes, at that…

I saw the writing on the wall, and ended up not taking two semesters of Greek, as I had planned. Instead, I took Spanish I and Spanish II at the local community college over the summer, got two easy A’s, and transferred 8 hours’ worth of credits. The bonus was, it was at the $80-something-an-hour community college rate, rather than the $3xx-per-hour four-year-college rate. 😛

But sadly, I never got to get into Greek. Like a lot of people with Basic Classics Background, I can make my way through a good interlinear text, but a lot of the awesome nuance of Greek tenses escapes me due to lack of formal schooling.
 
I took Koine (Biblical) Greek in seminary. Thankfully, Koine is the easiest of the Greek dialects to learn. I actually found it easier than Latin once you get past the alphabet. The only part I found tricky was that when some words are conjugated and declined, sometimes specific pairs of letters combine to form a different letter. On the other hand, there is no ablative case, so that is a plus.

I would suggest the Basics of Biblical Greek program by William Mounce. He is a protestant, so every once in a while the theological explanation can be a little off, but the program is very effective. Catholic seminaries also use his system. He offers classes online, but if you get the textbook, workbook and flash cards, you can learn by yourself just as well. If you learn everything in the program, you should come out with every grammar aspect found in the Bible and 99.98% of the words in the New Testament. The other 0.02% of words are almost all names and you can easily figure it out by yourself.
 
2 years pf Homeric Greek with some koine from John’s Gospel in high school.
 
Greek and Hebrew (Biblical and modern). But if you don’t keep at it, it’s so easy to let it slide into the netherworld of one’s brain.
 
I studied Classical Greek and Latin at University, and taught Medieval and Ecclesiastical Latin for several years.
 
One big problem is, there’s more than one “Greek.”

The Greek of Homer, Pericles, St. Paul, Eparchos, and Cavafy are radically different languages! I’ve learned enough Homeric Greek to fight my way through much of Iliad I, but it’s not much help in reading the Classical or NT authors, much less the mediaevals or moderns. Maybe if I get really used to Homer’s Attic-Ionic jargon I’ll get a feel for the other ancient texts … but so far that hasn’t happened.
 
The Great Courses now has Greek 101, taught by the same guy who does their Latin 101. It is free on video on Hoopla thru many libraries, but you will want to download the “guidebook” somewhere. Also it is on Amazon Video thru the Great Courses channel. Mostly Homeric, but includes Koine from the first lesson onward.

Not as hard as Latin, other than the lowercase Greek letters.
 
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In addition to Mounce’s course book, is there a good reference grammar for Biblical Greek that you can recommend?
 
Just a reminder (I say this every now and again) – acquiring and maintaining a foreign language is a time-intensive undertaking. That goes double for a language that is not actually spoken 😮

D
 
Well people do speak Greek. Modern Greek. 😉

Yup, lots of practice time, plus lots of study. But it is better to get started now, rather than years from now or never.
 
I don’t know of any specific grammar references outside of Mounce, sorry. My biggest help, however, was a concordance. I had one of Koine Greek, Latin, and English side by side verse by verse for the New Testament. It allowed me to compare the tenses and construction. You can figure out a lot that way and it gives you some word study background as to not only how it was translated, but also why it was translated as it was. The famous beta in John 20:31 springs to mind. Half of the ancient manuscripts have the beta and half don’t, creating two different tenses ‘That you may continue to be believing’ and ‘That you may come to believe’. The two are different theological reasons for John to write his Gospel. In Latin, however, they both translate as the same word. This is one of the evidences that scholars supporting the Vulgate use to state that while the scriptures themselves are divinely inspired, so too was the translation in preserving the fidelity of the Scriptures.
 
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I see no reason to learn Greek or Latin.
The words of God should be understood by all. One should not have to learn Greek or Latin to understand the words.
 
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