Basics of Biblical Greek Vocabulary Cards (Zondervan Vocabulary Builder Series, The)

If you are taking Greek, these are a must buy. Best $14 you'll ever spend on Greek especially if you use Mounce's text book.

The entire study package of Basics of Biblical Greek which includes the textbook, the study guide, the vocabulary cards, the summary sheet, and the lecture CD's is a blessed fruit of a long, thoughtful, meticulous, and high-tech labor of one of the world's best New Testament Greek scholars. I have to admit I have not studied Greek from other professors, but after studying Mounce, I simply can not imagine a better way to teach students an introduction to Biblical Greek than the one Prof. Mounce implements in this study packet. The structure and methodology are so impressively organized that I believe, without trying to diminish the role of an instructor, one can study by himself or herself without taking the class at a seminary. From start to finish, Prof. Mounce designs the lessons with solid exegesis skills as the goal in mind. He wastes no time but immediately exposes students with translation exercises using real Scripture passages in the study guide, even early in the first few chapters when he barely starts with nouns.

The lessons are divided into three major parts; nouns, adjectives and verbs. Each chapter begins with exegetical insights related to the topic being taught in that particular chapter. He then moves on by explaining the English and Greek forms. The nouns and adjectives are not too bad. They are usually divided into three types of declensions. While the nouns usually take on one of the three declensions, the most common configuration of adjectives is either 3-1-3 or 2-1-2 where the first, second and third numbers indicate the declension type for masculine, feminine and neuter genders, respectively. There are some discussions on special-case nouns having slightly abnormal endings; pant and ent, for examples. Now verbs are considerably more challenging because they not only have more numerous categories and rules, but the biggest obstacles are the tense stems and when they form the real verbs through a combination of augments, tense-formatives, connecting vowels, and personal endings. The trouble can be illustrated by comparing it to having to memorize the English present, past and perfect tenses of irregular and regular verbs which the Greek version has six; present, future active, aorist active and passive, perfect active and passive, instead of three in English. And each of these six stems has different forms not only depending on the person and number, but also on the voices; active, middle, and passive. On top of these, there is another parameter, called aspect, where these verbs take on other forms, the indicative covered in the early chapters of the verbs, subjunctive, infinitive and imperative. Some are similar if not the same as the indicatives, which make them even harder to distinguish which one is which. Here Prof. Mounce reminds students to always watch for the contexts. Context is your best friend when it comes to translation. There is no easy way of getting around this issue completely except in my view, to get the Greek Morphology text, also by Mounce. At the end of some chapters, there is coverage on extended materials that deal with special cases, additional rules in translation, contraction and morphology.

The summary sheet consists of all important rules involving word formation, verb-ending charts, and all the forms of frequently used verbs. It serves as a handy guide for students when doing the translation so they don't have to flip through the pages of the textbook. Some flipping of pages is inevitable, though, because the last few pages of the textbook has the list of major lexicons.

There are two types of drills in the study guide. The first is chapter-by-chapter review where students are asked to parse ten words in a table having the forms that have been covered up to that chapter. Next, there is a warm-up translation section consisting of seven short phrases or sentences to be translated before the real translation exercise begins with twenty sentences; some are long ones. From my experience, I sometimes had a headache after completing the translation work due to the intensity it involves in figuring out not only what the words mean, but also their forms, and how to restructure the sentence in English format that both are understandable and make sense. The second type of drill is the exam-type where the test materials are combined every five chapters. The tasks include parsing, grammar rules, and translations usually from a New Testament passage.

As in any other languages, learning Greek requires extra memory power, but not brute-force memorization of every single word indiscriminately. Prof. Mounce always warns students only to memory special-case words and rules such as endings and contractions, instead of every single word with all its garden variety of forms. Excellent advise.

Needless to say, I delightfully endorse Prof. Mounce as your virtual Greek instructor. If you decide to homeschool yourself, you can purchase the complete combo set at teknia dot com. I don't think Amazon sell the lecture CD set. But even if you are taking the class at the seminary, I don't see any harm for you to buy the combo set anyway, though you probably won't need the lecture CD's provided you have an excellent instructor.

Actually, I would recommend making your own vocabulary cards rather than buying pre-printed ones. This is because making your own cards provides your brain with one more channel through which to assimilate the material. However, if you are new to language learning, cards such as these can be a helpful start.

William Mounce has certainly done a competent job with these cards, so you can use them with confidence. The verb cards include the principal parts of the verbs. Be sure to learn them! A thorough knowledge of these will greatly enhance your ability to read Greek with ease.

I got an email from the fine folks at Amazon, encouraging me to review a recent purchase... it was Greek vocabulary cards... Well, the box is nice... sturdy construction... The cards are nice... tells you what chapter the word is from... The fonts are readable... Just an all around pleasure in what the author of the related text calls the "fog" of learning Greek...

There just has to be a special place of punishment for Alexander the Great for foisting all of this upon us...

So how about that... I just pioneered a review of a set of vocabulary cards. Who says you can't make history???

These cards are great for learning vocabulary. However, William Mounce, as part of his "system" for learning verbs, stresses the exact memorization of verbal roots as the key to recognizing all the different tense stems. For verbs, these cards list all the different tense stems that occur in the NT, but no verbal roots. In fact, "Basics of Biblical Greek" (the textbook) does not include the verbal roots for any verbs other than those occuring more than 50 times in the NT. Maybe memorization of the roots is not really essential. While it's not a show stopper by any means (you can usually figure out the root) if you are really trying to use the Basics of Biblical Greek "system" for learning verbs these cards lack a key component. Perhaps this is a way to get us all to purchase the Mounce morphology book.