Re: grammars: Hewett, Voelz, etc.

Chuck Tripp (ctripp@ptialaska.net)
Sat, 16 May 1998 15:35:29 -0500

Steven Cox wrote:
> On this subject, what first grammar would the list recommend to someone
> teaching themselves who has just finished Dobson's course and has
> probably not had much experience of formal grammar before?
>
clayton sterling bartholomew offered some suggestion. Among them Machen J:
NT Gk for beginners. That was the first book I used. I had borrowed and
had to return it before I got too far into it. I bought Dobson. It was
inexpensive. I kind of gets one started. I finished it but I found I was
having real difficulty getting my verbs down because of the somewhat
haphazard method of presentation. So when I went looking for another book,
I wanted a more systematic and thorough presentation.

I found Greek, An Intensive Course, by Hardy Hansen and Gerald M. Quinn. I
hesitated at first because it teaches Attic Greek. But I highly recommend
it. It is very systematic. It presents a lot of the little tools that
greek uses to convey ideas which I found that Dobson did not teach. It has
excellent drills which reinforce which is taught. It also had very
challenging exercises which present the concepts taught in ways which one
does not expect. They force one to think. By the time one is done with
the exercises of a given chapter, one feels that he has learned the
material. Also, I find that Attic is not so different from Koine that it
is not applicable to use in reading the GNT. Since I am still a learner, I
can not give you in concise terms the difference between Attic and koine,
but a few spelling differences notwithstanding, koine strikes me as a
subset of Attic. So I highly recommend Greek, An Intensive Course by
Hansen and Quinn.

Chuck Tripp
Kodiak, Alaska