Getting started in Greek

I promised a post for folks who may be a bit daunted by advanced syntactical discussions. Here it is.

Teachers counsel different approaches to starting the study of Greek. Go through a grammar, learn vocabulary, etc. All of that makes sense. My own approach was different.

The Lord saved me when I was a senior in high school. I had been a completely undisciplined student. If a subject interested me, I applied myself... a bit. If it didn't, or if it was hard, I didn't.

My conversion ruined every career plan I had, and slapped my aimless worldview around, so everything was a-jumble. I knew I was filled with a burning desire to know the Word, do the Word, communicate the Word to others. I wanted my life to count for the glory of God.

A pastor I knew told me he believed I was gifted to become a pastor myself, and invited me to join the training school he was starting. I was overwhelmed. It made perfect sense of my desires -- but there was that whole study thing. The thought of hard, continuous, disciplined study was very daunting.

And particularly, I knew I'd have to master Greek. He stressed that. It made sense to me. After all, how could I teach a book written in Hebrew and Greek, without knowing Hebrew and Greek?

So I decided to get a head start. I got a Machen grammar, as this would be our text. From it, months before school started, I learned the alphabet—just the alphabet. How to write it and say it, how to read and say words written in Greek.

Then I went to our public library, and found the Greek section. It had a Greek New Testament. I sat down with it, figured out how to find passages I knew, and read them.

This was over thirty-three years ago, and I still remember it vividly. I strained to say those words. I think I even broke out in a sweat, it was so hard to begin with. But there, in John 1:1, was that word λόγος. I recognized it from other words like logic, and I think I'd heard the pastor talk about it. Then there was that word θεὸς. I knew that! It was like in theology! This was exciting. Before too long, I'd read my first whole verse, in Greek.

I kept that up as Greek classes approached, looking up favorite verses, picking out Greek word-equivalents. I continued the same practice as I began Greek. I followed along in my Greek NT during sermons. It made Greek alive and exciting to me. I picked things out that translations didn't quite communicate -- tenses, numbers, prepositional phrases. The more I learned, the more I saw. The rewards increased as my knowledge deepened.

And so, when I've taught Hebrew and Greek, I've encouraged my students to do exactly that. Don't wait until you've had a year of the language to start looking at the testaments. Get the alphabet down cold, and start looking at the original texts now. You'll start noticing things early-on. The study will start rewarding you, right from the beginning.

That taste will help keep you going when you get to irregular verbs, hapaxes, and prepositions with scores of possible meanings (did someone say ἐπὶ?).

This also gives me the opportunity to stress one more time the importance of learning the alphabet. I encountered the greatest resistance to this in teaching Hebrew, because its alphabet is so much stranger to English readers than Greek is. Too many students treat the Hebrew alphabet as if it's a series of coded symbols. They only learn it well enough to find them in BDB, not well enough to read them. This guarantees failure.

If you're starting, start with mastering the alphabet, and reading the actual Greek NT aloud. It isn't essential that you understand it at first; it is essential that you get your brain used to it. Then the rest will come much more easily.