I was instructed to buy Van Voorst, Building Your New Testament Greek
Vocabulary, along with the introductory NT Greek text when I started Greek
through a church Sunday School class. I didn't really use Van Voorst until
I'd finished the grammar, when I proceeded to stuff frequencies down through
25 occurances in my head. I memorize fairly easily, so I just did it over a
period of a few months. What I found, though, is that the meanings of the
words don't stick; I would see a word, know that I'd seen it before, and have
no idea what it meant. It wasn't until I saw things in context that some of
the glosses made any sense. A funny one is SULLAMBANW, which I learned as
"seize, conceive", and not until I read Luke 1 did I realize that the
"conceive" meant "become pregnant" -- I had pictured conceiving an idea.
And after some reading, I just plain disagreed with several glosses that I had
memorized. I use Bauer all the time now, and no longer refer to any other
simpler lexicons.
I think lists of vocab are useful to introduce a student to the concept of
structure in the language, but for acquiring the vocab, nothing beats reading,
reading, reading. To learn vocab, I record all the words I have to look up,
frequently with notes to related words, but I no longer find the frequency and
family lists very useful.
Karen Pitts
kpitts@sarnoff.com
Hopewell Presbyterian Church, Hopewell, NJ, teacher of NT Greek
Sarnoff Corporation, Princeton, NJ, statistician