> At 07:16 PM 11/7/97 -0600, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
> >I'm not sure whether this answer fits your particular question, but if it
> >doesn't, you can try again.
>
> It answers a great deal of it.
>
> I have a few pedagogical problems here:
Allow me to butt in to make a serious plug for Bill Mounce's books here.
Jonathan's question has touched on one of the issues that I struggled with
for _years_ in learning Greek: namely what appeared to be page after page
of seemingly random rules and special cases.
The ending of contract verbs are a prime example of this. However
Mounce's book adds what is --at least for me-- a near ideal dosage of
morphology into the mix. That is, a useful understanding of *why* the
endings change like they do.
(Aside from his "Introduction", Mounce also has a text specifically on the
Morphology of NTGreek which I've found very useful.)
Now, I don't know if Mounce's approach is for everyone; but I _do_ know
that for someone like me --someone who has a _lot_ of trouble with rote
learning of apparently special cases and who needs at least a minimal
understanding of the underlying structure-- Mounce's approach is dead on.
> 1. How can you look at a verb form in the GNT, say, LALW, and know that you
> should look it up in the dictionary as LALEW? Is there any way?
My experience has been that understanding why the differences in the
ending arise goes a long way towards answering exactly this type of question.
But that said, allow me to plug yet a third of Mounce's books, his
Analytical Lexicon. That is, it is a text in which the words are given in
their inflected form (e.g. LALW or LALEIS, etc.) and point to the lemma,
to the dictionary form.
> 2. Is it helpful to learn the uncontracted forms as well as the contracted
> forms, or should I just teach the contracted forms (as I have for the -EW
> verbs).
I would answer this simply as Mounce does: That is, by learning the base,
uncontracted form + the rules for contractions, you simply end up having to
memorize less stuff in the end than had you simply committed the raw
endings to memory. (And by having all of those rules under your belt, you
have the jump on other verb forms where those rules are also applicable.)
Nichael
-- Nichael Cramer work: ncramer@bbn.com home: nichael@sover.net http://www.sover.net/~nichael/