Learn to Read New Testament Greek

This review is written by someone learning Greek on their own. I hope this is helpful for someone in the same situation or for someone who is brushing up on Greek learned in the past.

I have looked extensively at a couple of the other popular beginning Greek grammars although I won't be doing any direct comparisons.

Regarding the aesthetics, the hardcover is very sturdy in addition to being very appealing to look at. The black cover is a nice tie-in to the author's last name. The paper is high quality, crisp and white which takes to a highlighter very well. The conjugations are in gray shaded boxes which helps them stand out and makes them easy to locate when wanting to go back and review them. The only thing I don't like is that the font chosen for the Greek is a little less formal than what most of us are used to seeing which takes a little while to get used to.

In a word this book is efficient. There are no chapter overviews, introductions, summaries, what you'll learn in the next chapter, etc. which is usually annoying anyway. The author gets right down to business in each chapter. Each of the 26 chapters are short enough that you don't need those things.

This doesn't mean the book's information is skimpy. You will learn a lot of the important terms so that when you read a more technical Bible commentary or read what others write about Greek, you will have learned or at least have a reference for the terms at the beginning level which are explained well.

The exercises for the first 17 chapters of the book are made-up sentences in Greek that the student translates. All of the words in the sentences are from vocabulary that has been learned previously in the book.

Starting in chapter 18, Bible verses are used for the exercises. When there is a word in a verse that hasn't been learned, the English gloss (a short basic definition) is listed in parenthesis next to the Greek word. This is much nicer than at least one other book where the extra vocabulary is listed on another page, sometimes requiring a page turn so that one is constantly flipping back and forth. There is an answer key for the exercises in the Appendix at the end of the book.

For more extensive exercises there is a companion workbook, sold separately. There is no answer key in the workbook, but if you write to the publisher, they will send you one in PDF format. The workbook (which was a pleasant surprise since I didn't expect it to be sent to me) has all sorts of exercises coming at the Greek from many angles.

Verbs are introduced in chapter 2 and all of the indicative verbs are covered by chapter 17. There are various methods for introducing verbs in the books I've seen. I like having them introduced early so that they can be reviewed frequently as time goes on. There are very helpful charts of the indicative verb forms in the middle of the book. I wish I would have known this earlier so that I could have referred to it as I went along but it wasn't mentioned earlier in the book. There is also a very helpful large fold-out complete Greek Verb Chart glued to the inside of the back cover.

There are a couple of very important items that were put in footnotes which I think should be in the main part of the text. (There are very few, thankfully, and they are at the end of each section where they are easy to see.) In particular is footnote iii. on page 31 which mentions that kai can mean "both", "also" or "even". So be sure to pay close attention to the footnotes.

I believe this book is a very efficient way to learn beginning level Greek. I would think it would be especially useful for someone reviewing Greek that they've already learned. I like to use more than one book to be able to read things explained in different ways, but this book is my first choice for the primary book to study and I highly recommend it.

While the content of this book may be great (I'm just starting with it this semester), the Kindle version has some issues. One major issue is that the breathing marks are hard to distinguish. The Kindle version must be using graphics for the Greek characters instead of a scalable font. This is a bit of a problem.

This is the book used by World Video Bible School, a course offered on line for free. The book is an excellent introduction to Biblical Greek, and I'll highly recommend it. Enjoy, Bill

Well done for a beginner. Get the workbook that goes with it and that helps reinforce the textbook content.

wanted to get a head start in case I end up going to a Bible college.....self study......very high reviews.......very user friendly

It is a good textbook to study Koine Greek, along with its workbook. The text is concise and yet rich in information, and the author puts the grammar points in the reasonable order. For example, when talking about declension of nouns, Black puts second declension first, first declension second and third declension far back in the book, based on the difficulty of the declensions. I'm taking a Koine Greek class with this book and I think it is really helpful for me to study it!

I like this book very much. I have been studying Biblical Greek for several years using books and the internet. At 79 years old it hasn't been easy for me as I am studying Biblical Hebrew at the same time. It is easy to get some of it mixed up at times. I do have to use a magnifying glass to read this book although most of my vision is OK as I have had cataract operations. But I do recommend this book highly, especially for someone who has a little knowledge of Biblical Greek. Others may find that the smaller print is easier to read.

ok but not up to date, this manual does not go into VERBAL ASPECT to any great degree.

A required text for my first semester of New Testament Greek. However, Black is readable enough to start any layman toward understanding the rich language of the New Testament.

Comprehensive but concise. Easy to read.