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Read Greek in 30 Days

Book Review

Okay, in one sense, I'm disqualified to comment on this because I've had a year of Greek and some experience in reading the Greek New Testament.

I love the idea of this book, and for the person with gumption, it is a great, great resource.

I was frustrated with how slow the start of the book was. Do I really have to go through all this grammar at the start? If you want me reading in 30 days, then let's jump into it and start reading. Tell me about the grammar as we go.

That's not really fair. I have already learned the Greek alphabet, essential, of course, if you want to read Greek. I have been introduced to the Greek verb tenses along with the mood and voice. I learned to conjugate verbs already, and I learned how to work with gender, case, and number for adjectives, nouns, and pronouns. I learned the prepositions, and I already knew from learning German that prepositions can have varying "domains" of meaning, so that there's no precise translation. The meaning of English prepositions overlap wildly with Greek (and German).

With that background, it's possible to bypass the review and jump into the NT text. I'm sure someone starting from scratch can't do that. It's important to understand the basics of Greek grammar. It is much more complicated than English grammar. A measure of introduction is unavoidable, and this book does a good job of covering it quickly. I don't have any way of knowing if that will be too quickly for rank beginners.

Now for what is past the basics of grammar. I have set this books aside for a point soon when I am done with a couple projects. At 53, my memory is not what it used to be, and consistency is going to be essential for following the plan, which I love. 

The plan involves learning the 500 most used words in the Greek New Testament. Brilliant idea. I didn't know I would be able to get such a list. If someone had mentioned it, I would definitely have gotten on learning those years ago. No one did, so the thought was introduced for the first time in Read Greek in 30 Days.

I have an entire book to write, but the next project is to go through the book a day at a time, get those 500 words down, and then get on with reading the New Testament.