Helps and Keeping Up Your Greek

Dave Black has another good paragraph on keeping up your Greek:

I will not go into the mechanics of keeping up with your Greek this summer. For this, you can refer to my book Using New Testament Greek in Ministry, published by Baker Book House. Con Campbell and a host of other Greek teachers will tell you that the use of helps such as interlinears is anathema. Do I agree? You bet I don’t! Do I really care what helps you use? I want those of you who are struggling with your Greek to employ any tool available that will keep you in the Greek text. And if you are feeling like a nobody, just remember that God specially chooses nobodies to glorify Himself. The success or failure of your Greek studies depends on the extent to which your thoughts and attitudes and habits are brought under the control of the Holy Spirit. Our constant daily priority is to submit ourselves to the Spirit’s control so that His fruit may be manifest in our lives. I am the ultimate egalitarian when it comes to languages. Greek is for everyone who has a love for Bible study. It is hoped that through our class many will be led into a deeper knowledge of God’s Word and challenged to become more obedient to the call of God on their lives — despite their struggles and failings. Being able to read your Greek New Testament is one of the most joyous and rewarding activities possible, and I have labored diligently to equip you for this task. I make no pretense of having successfully accomplished this. But I have tried. Ultimately, however, the work is God’s. Now let us trust Him to accomplish it!

Dave already linked to my own previous post on this topic, so I hardly need to add anything.

But I will anyhow!

The key problem I find amongst pastors and teachers who are not in an academic environment is not that they lack skill discovering lexical forms (though they generally do), but rather that they don’t have enough exposure to Greek text to provide context and background to their study, or more precisely, they take so look piecing together individual Greek words, that they can’t really study the passage.

The best solution to this, in my opinion, is to read quantities of Greek. Large quantities. Reader’s lexicons and interlinears make that possible. Don’t neglect digging in and learning the nuts and bolts. But if you’re already used to the sound and feel, you’re going to find it easier to practice the details.

Even though I always get in trouble on this, I must recommend both memorization and reading aloud. One of my own methods for keeping my Greek fresh is to read passages aloud and record myself doing so. I then put them on CDs which I have in the car. Right now I have Philippians, 1 John, and the first 8 chapters of Romans. I started doing this when I was teaching and noticed that my pronunciation was not as fluid as it once had been. I have been quite horrified to hear some of my “slips of the tongue” when listening to myself, but things have gotten better as I put this into practice.

Besides, if you want your spirits lifted, there’s nothing quite like the text of Philippians to listen to as you drive!