For some years now I’ve thought about training myself up in Biblical Greek. I’m going to take a crack at it over the next few months. While I do that, I hope to blog hear a bit about how that’s going and any interesting things I learn on the way.
For this first post, I want to share some of the tools I’ve got at my disposal. During a recent visit, my father-in-law gave me a Greek Reader’s New Testament (Thanks Scott!) and the Basics of Biblical Greek by William Mounce. From there I’ve started in on the basics, reviewing the Greek alphabet and pronunciations rules (which I already knew from a previous introduction to the language).
I’m practicing reading Greek and have now read through 1 Peter 1 and 1 John 1. However, I’m still just getting the initial pronunciation down, so it takes me as long to read a word or two in Greek as it would to say a sentence or two in English. I’ve found some MP3 audio files online of fluent readers reading the Greek. I may see if I can use those to improve my pronunciation and speed (which are both horrible for now).
Another tool I’m using to help in this process is Anki. This is a tool for building sets of flash cards, which are pretty mandatory for learning the vocabulary. The extra gimmick, though, is that Anki will reorder your decks according to how well you know your vocabulary. So, each time you go through the deck, you note on each card how hard it was to come up with the answer.
I’m sure someone has some pre-built decks for Mounce’s vocabulary, but I want the practice of typing out the words to help me as well (it’s a visual-kinesthetic learning thing). As such, I had to see about using a keyboard. Unfortunately, I had the craziest time trying to get a decent Greek Polytonic keyboard to work under Ubuntu. However, since I got myself a new Mac for Christmas, the built-in Greek Polytonic keyboard was pretty close to what I needed. However, it uses the wrong phi (“φ”) character by default. So I used a program called Ukelele to edit the Greek Polyphonic to use the “circle with a pipe through it” version rather than the “long curly line” version. I can now switch to Greek as easy as hitting Cmd-Opt-Space. Ἀί κάν συίτχ βάκ τού Ἐγγλεις ἄζ ἴζι ἄζ ἵττιγγ θώς κἰζ ἀγήν.
Anyway, I’m having fun with it so far. Cheers.
