Product Description

Basics is a first year Greek grammar, supported by a workbook and teacher aids. It now comes with a CD ROM.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #427792 in Books
• Published on: 1999-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

From the Back Cover
Basics of the Biblical Greek is an entirely new, integrated approach to teaching and learning New Testament Greek. It makes learning Greek a natural process and shows from the very beginning how an understanding of Greek helps in understanding the New Testament. Basics of Biblical Greek: combines the best of the deductive and the inductive approaches, explains the basics of English grammar before teaching Greek grammar, uses from the very beginning parts of verses from the New Testament instead of "made-up" exercises, includes at the beginning of every lesson a brief devotional, written by a well-known New Testament scholar, that demonstrates how the principles taught in the lesson apply directly to an understanding of the biblical text, is the most popular first-year Greek course used in colleges and seminaries today, comes with an interactive study aid CD-ROM, containing an eight-minute greeting from the author and the fun, helpful, and graphical vocabulary-memorizing program "Learning the Basics of Biblical Greek" (runs on Power Mac and Windows 95), where you can hear Greek words pronounced and sung in more than 200 familiar hymns. The CD-ROM also contains the powerful Greek vocabulary-drilling programs Flashworks(TM) and Parseworks from Teknia Language Tools (runs on Macintosh and Windows 3.1 and 95). A separate workbook is also available.

About the Author
William D. Mounce (Ph.D., University of Aberdeen) is the preaching pastor at Cornerstone Fellowship in Spokane, Washington. He was professor of New Testament and director of the Greek Language program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and prior to that professor of New Testament and Greek at Azusa Pacific University. He has written a large number of Greek language textbooks and tools.

Customer Reviews

An excellent textbook, but maybe not to everyone's tastes
I bought Mounce's book as a complete beginner with the aim of learning the basics of Greek on my own. I found it was exactly the sort of book I needed and I was able to get through the book very quickly. It sets things out very clearly and focuses on the patterns within Greek rather than rote memorization, which is a big help. One of the best features is the interactive CD which provides some really useful resouces.

I think the reason some people don't get on with this book is that it is still structured in quite a formal way and uses some academic language. This means the book is very rigorous, but if you're the sort of person who likes to learn little bits from different areas of the language at any one time then the approach may be frustrating. If you identify with that, I would recommend Dobson's "Learn New Testament Greek", an excellent book that takes a very different approach.

I suppose it comes down to knowing how you prefer to learn. My opinion is that if you like to have everything presented to you at once in a rigorous way, this book is the best available, but if not perhaps you'd be best looking elsewhere.

Bewildering
I had studied NT Greek some 20 years ago, so was not a complete novice. I wanted a book I could work through at home, since I do not have access to a tutor.
I found this book utterly impenetrable. Maybe it is fine if you have a tutor to guide you through it, but for home study I think it is useless. I fail to see why other reviewers find it so marvellous.
The new Duff / Wenham Cambridge book is a model of clarity, and far more digestible.

One of the very best
I'm very surprised to read such a negative review below. I have numerous Greek study books and have been nearly entirely self taught. I have Elements of New Testament Greek and while it's good, I don;t think it compares to this. The great strength of this book is that it's aimed specifically at Biblical Greek, teaching only what is known. The accompanying CD helps with the audio lectures and the writing style is clear and down-to-Earth. It doesn;t use technical language without explanations and there's a ton of stuff avaialble from the website and elsewhere to download and use.
There's a reason why this book is a standard among universities: it's very, very good.