From: Ken Smith (kens@180solutions.com)
Date: Tue Feb 05 2002 - 02:46:12 EST
I can very much sympathize with your difficulties and frustrations, Chuck. I've spent much more time trying to develop my Greek reading skills than my French, and I can reach nearly any French text much faster and with significantly greater comprehension than any Greek text, the NT included.
One thing that I've found helpful is actually listening, in real time, to the Greek New Testament. You can start with individual chapters from Matthew as they're posted to:
http://www.greeklatinaudio.com/index.html
Or you can get pretty much the entire NT (with an Erasmian pronunciation) from:
http://audiogreek.0catch.com/ or
http://www.ccel.org/a/anonymous/gnt/home.html
But if you're wanting to really develop your listening skills, and have much driving to do, I highly recommend Zodhiates' Modern Greek reading of the entire NT, on cassette tape, available at:
http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product/60685187?item_no=9574017&event=SRC
And of course, if you want a fairly close approximation of "original" Koine pronunciation, Randall Buth's course materials, designed for moving past the "language monitor" style of reading Greek at which you and I both appear to be stuck. are available for order at:
http://www.biblicalulpan.org
I haven't yet ordered them myself, but they're one of the next few purchases on my list.
Ken Smith
-----Original Message-----
From: Chuck Tripp [mailto:ctripp@ptialaska.net]
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 11:23 PM
To: Biblical Greek
Subject: [b-greek] Re: Read or Study?
This thread is a few days old but it caught my interest. I started teaching myself greek about 7 years ago (has it been that long?). I find it in a way a most frustrating language. I know two others besides my native language, and I have to say that I find greek by far the most challenging of my non-native languages. I adopted a strategy of reading extra-biblical greek texts I was not familiar with in order to a) gain experience interpreting greek texts which I am not 'reading into' the text what I 'know' it says, since much of the biblical text is familiar to me and b) try to gain a feel for the meaning of words words and how the language is structured in non-biblical settings.
I started Herodotus 3.5 years ago figuring that it would be interesting in its own right. Since I started I have managed to get to chapter 193 of book I. I can see that I am moving along more quickly but I am not yet reaching one of my objective of reading large amounts of greek text. It is like I am still on the steep portion of the learning curve.
I have a question on where I should go from here. I am looking at 3 options. One would be to continue reading Herodotus as I have been, as an unfamiliar text. Second, I purchased a volume containing books v-vii by Loeb Classical Library which contains both the greek and an english translating. It would be kind of like cheating, but I could cover considerable ground by 'peeking' over at the facing page. Another would be this: i have seen on a web-page that Anabasis by Xenophon was rated as a 1 on as scale of 1-10 of relative difficulty of Greek texts. Herodotus was rated 5, Theucidides (sp?) was rated a 10 (a friend of mine who has read some of it says it is really difficult). The GNT was not listed. My objective in going to Anabasis would be reading a text which I could more easily read in large volumes. As to my currentl rate of reading, I can read chapter of Herodotus in about 2 hours or maybe 1, sometimes in 5 minutes depending on what is thrown at me. Earlier this year, i read 1 Corinthians pre
tending I had never read it before and it was a very rewarding experience. It took me about 8 weeks.
I am curious on feed-back on which approach would be the best or perhaps an alternate approach. In another question: what level of proficiency is attainable? I am no where near to the point of reading greek like an english newpaper. Maybe I'd have to be heariing it all day long to be able to attain that level of proficiency. I frequently remind myself that little five year-olds were running around chattering away in this most challenging language.
Chuck Tripp
Kodiak, Alaska
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