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Title: Learn New Testament Greek by John Dobson ISBN: 0-8010-2994-5 Publisher: Baker Academic Pub. Date: 01 January, 1989 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.1 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Good intro or companion to a Greek grammar
Comment: For Christmas I asked for and received this book and the NT Greek grammar by Mounce at the same time, thinking that they would complement each other. So far, my expectation has been completely fulfilled!
The good points of this book are:
1. It provides lots of practice with reading Greek sentences. Lots of practice is the only way to become fluent in any language, and this book provides it. To me this is the book's primary good point (but see #4 below).
2. As the other reviews say, it gets you into the language right away with few technical details
3. It is highly inductive, meaning it doesn't go thru lists of paradigms and rules, but gets you right into reading the text.
4. This book has the only really good explanation of preposition usage I've seen. They all - including Mounce - show the little boxes with arrows: eis, en, ex, hypo, etc. This is useful as far as it goes. But this book does something I've never seen: it gives multiple examples from the New Testament for each possible meaning of each preposition. For example, most books say "en" means "in, with, or by"; but this book gives you actual NT examples of "en" meaning each of these. Wonderful!
The bad points are:
1. It is highly inductive. I don't think this kind of learning style suits me as an adult at all. True, the deductive method is different from how we learned language as children. Proponents of inductive learning (such as Prof. Harris in his sometimes interesting alternative Latin grammar) always point this out and state without proof that everybody knows the inductive method is superior. And for children, they're probably right. However, we *were* children then. I think it a fairly well-established fact that children learn differently from adults: and the classical schooling model has been based on this fact for 25 centuries. As a result, based both on reason and my own experience, I don't believe that a purely inductive method is the proper framework for adults to learn in; but then I have not surveyed all adults nor performed a controlled experiment on them all. What I think I can say with certainty is that it's not the right framework for *ME* to learn in, and I doubt I'm alone.
2. Going further than most NT grammars (even Mounce to some extent) that don't really explain accentuation rules, this book ignores accents altogether! (It doesn't even print them in the text.) I am still "coasting" on the accentuation rules I learned early and very thoroughly from Hansen and Quinn's Attic Greek book (H&Q does at least one thing right), and I find they really do help. Without even accents printed in the text, I question whether you can get good consistent accent placement, making it much more difficult to talk to others or probably even to remember the words yourself. I naturally find myself using Latin-like accent rules, which is sometimes correct (i.e. present tense of many verbs) but usually goes horribly wrong for nouns and adjectives. Since I have Mounce's grammar also, everytime I find a new word in Dobson's book, I write in the accent. It's a good test for my own understanding, but it shouldn't be necessary.
I believe these problems would make this book not work for me as a stand-alone way of learning Greek. But for somebody who is using another grammar such as Mounce and using this book as a side reading source that gives you lots of practice and another point of view, this book is very useful.
Rating: 5
Summary: Best Greek tutor text you can find
Comment: I had known nothing about Greek before I picked up the book and started reading it, but within 30 mins, I had already memorized the alphabet, and was learning all kinds of words. The words you learn though are not in lists where you have to memorize them, he just puts them here and there in phrases and tells you what they mean. Within 3 days (30 mins a day) I was saying phrases and sentences, and within 15 days, I was reading paragraphs with ease. I've read many greek books, but this one tops them all with it's easy to learn style and it's fun way of learning. For learning Greek, Learn New Testament Greek was the best book I ever read.
Rating: 5
Summary: Good Method For Starting
Comment: John Dobson's 'Learn New Testament Greek' is, for me at least, the perfect way to get into the ancient Greek language. It requires only persistence and attentive reading, so it fits in well with my later-life schedule and personality. The other reviewers find some more faults with the method than I do, probably because I know less, and am not that worried about accents yet. But then again, as far as I can tell from looking at photos and facsimiles of old manuscripts, they had no accents! My only objection to Dobson's book here is his translation philosophy. He consistently and persistently recommends the very type of paraphrased, approximate and (to me) dubious translation practice that has driven me to get the hang of Greek and Hebrew to begin with! I don't see the point of totally obscuring the oddities and richness inherent in ancient language usage just for the sake of smooth, denatured English.
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Title: Basic Greek in Thirty Minutes a Day (New Testament Greek Workbook for Laymen) by James Found ISBN: 0871232855 Publisher: Bethany House Publishers Pub. Date: 01 May, 1983 List Price(USD): $17.99 |
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Title: Vine's Learn New Testament Greek An Easy Teach Yourself Course In Greek by W. E. Vine ISBN: 0785212329 Publisher: Nelson Reference & Electronic Publishing Pub. Date: 04 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.98 |
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Title: Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar by William D. Mounce ISBN: 0310250870 Publisher: Zondervan Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $41.99 |
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Title: Greek New Testament by Kurt Aland ISBN: 3438051133 Publisher: American Bible Society Pub. Date: 01 June, 1983 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Basics of Biblical Greek: Workbook by William D. Mounce ISBN: 0310250862 Publisher: Zondervan Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.99 |
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