Reboot Your Greek
A Forty-Day New Testament Greek Refresher
Darin H. Land
Reboot Your Greek
A Forty-Day New Testament Greek Refresher
Copyright © 2018 Darin H. Land. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-4831-1
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-4832-8
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-4833-5
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For Jill
ἀγαπητῄ μου, προτρεπούσῃ καὶ φίλῃ
Preface
If you’re reading this book, chances are you’re one of the many people who have studied New Testament Greek in the past but have left it aside for just long enough that it feels very rusty. You’re a little bit embarrassed to say that you used to be able to read the New Testament in the original language, but now the thought of trying to read a verse—let alone a whole passage—is scary. The very thought of it brings back bad memories of tests and quizzes in your Beginning Greek course in college or seminary.
You may sometimes think it would be nice to get back to where you were at the end of that course. However, the idea of slogging through that beginning Greek grammar all over again leaves you feeling overwhelmed. You may have even tried going through the grammar a time or two, only to give up, exhausted. Well, you are not alone. This seems to be a common situation. The causes are no doubt multiple, but the result is the same . . . a wish, a dream unfulfilled.
This book aims to give you credit for all that hard work you invested in your Beginning Greek course. I’m not going to ask you to redo that course as if you were coming to Greek for the first time. At the same time, I recognize that there are many things that you have forgotten. So what you need is a refresher. You don’t need the whole course all over again, but you need to be reminded of all those things in a way that is manageable.
The first goal of this book is to get you back to where you were in a way that is relatively painless—as compared to your first go at Greek. The second goal of the book is to provide you with tools that may have been lacking from your first experience, tools which would have prevented the loss of your Greek in the first place. It would be little use to refresh your knowledge of Greek, only to see you lose it yet again. The fundamental idea of these tools is that the best way for you to retain your working knowledge of Greek is to read Greek regularly; and the best way for you to read Greek regularly is if the effort-reward ratio highly favors reward over effort.
This book operates on the basis of two bits of conventional wisdom to make the process manageable, on the one hand, and durable on the other. The first bit was given to me by one of my Greek professors (after I had had to relearn Greek myself, by the way). She claimed that it only takes fifteen minutes per day to maintain one’s level in a language, while it takes thirty minutes per day to progress in a language. So the lessons in this book are geared to be completed within about thirty minutes per day. Well, actually, the exercises are so designed. It is not enough just to read the chapters; you must also do the exercises if you wish to get back to where you once were.
My working hypothesis is that you do not need to complete every exercise of every lesson. Spend thirty minutes or so on each exercise set and then quit for the day. Seriously! Don’t feel that you have to master every aspect of every sentence of every exercise. Such an approach is likely to leave you feeling just like you did when you tried to reread your introductory Greek textbook—overwhelmed and ready to give up. Commit to spending thirty minutes per day, and I’m confident you will find yourself progressing at a rewarding pace. You will likely find that the things that are initially troubling will become clear as you progress through the book.
The second bit of conventional wisdom that shapes the form of this book is that it takes forty days of repeated action to form a habit. That’s why this book has forty lessons. The hope is that you will complete one lesson every day for forty days, and thereby form a new Greek-reading habit. This new habit can be a lifelong habit of reading a little Greek every day. Consequently, you will never again find yourself in the position of being a former Greek reader.
There is a danger, though, in establishing a habit through the assistance of this book. It is the same danger that you faced at the end of your first-year Greek course—the habit of not reading Greek, but doing a Greek lesson. There is a very real danger that you will come to the end of the lessons in this book and feel that you can relax, that you don’t need to continue reading at the same pace. Perhaps that is partially true (my teacher said you only need fifteen minutes a day to maintain), but once you leave off reading—even for a day or two—the habit is broken and it is difficult to get that habit back. Think of your own experience! You know what it’s like to leave off the Greek habit . . . and regret that later. I implore you, dear reader: determine now to make reading Greek—a little each day, and more some days—a lifelong habit!
One last piece of advice on this topic. Why don’t you fortify yourself against the broken-habit danger described in the preceding paragraph? Instead of just doing the lessons each day, why don’t you also commit to reading a New Testament passage of your choice for fifteen minutes every day throughout the duration of your forty-day study? That way, the habit you form will be truly a Greek reading habit, not based on the artificial crutch of a secondary book. And then when you get to the end of the forty days and feel like you need a reward break, you can reduce your time to just the fifteen minutes. It will feel like a well-deserved reward, but it won’t come at the expense of breaking your good habit. Before you go on to the first lesson, decide now what investment you want to make toward your Greek reading future!
Day 1: Dusting Off and Updating
So, how long has it been since you read Greek? No judgment here, I’m just curious. Has it been one week, one month, one year, one decade? It doesn’t really matter how long it’s been, because memory is a funny thing. A lot of the stuff you learned is buried in there somewhere, but it’s hard to find the key to unlock that memory. And losing the “key” can happen a lot faster than we might think. That’s why I kept “one week” in the list. Even if you leave off your Greek reading for just a week, you can already begin to lose some of what you thought you would never forget. But don’t despair! As I already said, a lot of that stuff is still in there somewhere.
Let me give you an example. When I was a child, I lived in the central African country of Burundi. I spoke some of the local language, Kirundi. In 2007, I returned for a visit after having been away from the country for nearly thirty years (aside from a brief visit about twenty years earlier). If you had asked me how to say, “Thank you,” in Kirundi, I would have thought hard and then said, “I can’t remember.” But when
