Learning the Basics of Biblical Greek... with Stephen Harper?

I made a shocking discovery today. I realize now why Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament. It was to release the 3rd edition of his best-selling Greek grammar, Basics of Biblical Greek! Or wait... didn't Bill Mounce write that? Well, the mistake is an easy one to make. Look for yourself:

I don't know about you, but this creeped me out a little -- and also made me proud to be Canadian. You have quite the doppelganger, Mr. PM!

Grammatical Diagram of Luke 14:28-30

As promised, I went through Luke 14:28-30 and completed a grammatical diagram. Click here to see the PDF. (I used unicode with SBL Greek font, so hopefully it will show up properly for you! If you don't have SBL Greek, you can download it here. It's free, and is fun to type in.)

Pocket Paradigms for Biblical Greek

It's been a few weeks, and I'm finally finished. In my spare time I've been putting together a little book of Greek paradigms to aid me in reading through the Greek New Testament. For a few years I've been looking for a pocket handbook for paradigms, similar to Mark Futato's Pocket Paradigms for Biblical Hebrew, but haven't found anything comparable. And since it's annoying to lug around textbooks all the time, I compiled charts from a few standard textbooks, and with the magic of Microsoft Publisher, produced a Pocket Paradigms for Biblical Greek. (This confirms my descent into extreme nerdom.) If anyone has come across a paradigms book for Greek, I'd be very interested to take a look at it, to compare what it includes, and all that.

Greek Prose Composition

I have begun to work through North and Hillard's Greek Prose Composition. It's a great little book, published over 100 years ago, that was once commonly used in schools for teaching children to write Greek. It offers exercise-by-exercise vocabulary lists, a English to Greek vocabulary list, and 175 composition exercises, beginning with simple sentences and working toward the composition of long paragraphs. This book teaches composition in what appears to be Attic Greek, which precedes Koine. Some forms are different, but for the most part it is easy enough to transfer over from Koine to Attic.

Greek composition is challenging (and humbling!), but a lot of fun! I suggest at least downloading this treasure, or getting your hands on a hardcopy.

Textkit - Greek and Latin

This is a great resource I came across lately. I'm sure it's not new to some of you, but if it is, do check it out! There are all sorts of downloadable resources for learning Greek and Latin. Most significant, in my opinion, are the composition workbooks. These workbooks, such as North and Hillard's andSidgwick's, have been in use for over 100 years, going back to a time when kids learned Greek and Latin in elementary school. Where's a Delorian when you need one?! I've taken plenty of Greek classes while at Briercrest College, but I still find my recall of vocabulary and verb forms to be a touch dodgey. I figure that learning to write, instead of just to read, Greek will help it all along. Do check out Textkit. It's a candy store for nerdy academic kids!