How to get ahead on Greek before theological college

So, you’re going to theological college and you want to get started on Greek. You’ve heard it’s a bit hard, but you’ve got a few weeks or months to go, you’re keen to finally tackle God’s word in one of its original languages, and anything you can do to get ahead of the game will help.

The first thing you should do is email your college to find out who is teaching ‘Introductory Greek’, what textbook will be assigned, and what pronunciation scheme they use. If they use a standard textbook then go ahead and buy it; if they use in-house material, save your money for now and wait.

The immediate stumbling block you need to overcome—which is time-consuming and will halt any actual language learning until you do—is the alphabet. Greek uses a different alphabet to English, and until you can read it you’re going nowhere. Here’s two sentences: en archē ēn ho logos; Ἥρ ἄρ τυὸ σέντενσες. The first you can sound out, and you might recognize it as the start of John 1:1. It’s transliterated into a Latin script so you can read it. The second sentence is all in Greek letters, but they actually spell out English words. They remain complete nonsense to anyone who hasn’t mastered the alphabet.¹

Almost certainly your college uses the Erasmian pronunciation. There are good reasons not to use this, but I also don’t recommend learning a pronunciation scheme directly in contradiction to your teachers.² A search for ‘Koine Greek alphabet’ will bring up more than a few sites to help you get started. Two of my suggestions would be Bill Mounce’s site or Greek Language and Linguistics; the latter does not teach Erasmian, but historically accurate schemes such as Hellenistic Greek, Classical, and Modern Greek.³

How do you learn the alphabet? There are no new tricks here: practice sounding out words, practice writing out letters ad nauseum, and recite the sounds of the letters. Find one of the alphabet songs on YouTube (e.g. Danny Zacharias). As you start to get the hang of it, pick up the New Testament and try to sound out and then read whole verses at a time. Even without understanding a word, you’ll be improving your recognition and sight-reading ability. Lastly, to practice your writing, try copying out verses from the New Testament as well as reading them. Practice daily, because repetition builds habits, and habits embed learning.

The other suggestion I would make to soon-to-be-students is to come to grips with grammatical terminology. Grammar terms are words we use to talk about other words: e.g. noun, adjective, participle, gerundive, subordinate concessive clause, and so on. Since it’s almost guaranteed that you will attend a course taught along traditional Grammar-Translation lines,⁴ getting a grasp on what grammar words mean will make those first few weeks all the less confusing. Samuel Lamerson has a book designed to do just this, English Grammar to Ace New Testament Greek, though webpages explaining English grammar will do the trick (e.g. English Grammar 101).

Mastering the alphabet and basic grammar terms will stop those first few classes of Greek from being a trial by drowning. Instead, you should be able to approach them with modest confidence as you begin this exciting time of studying God’s word.

^1. It’s a semi-accurate transliteration of ‘Here are two sentences’.↩

^2. It’s not that difficult to learn a second pronunciation scheme later on and switch between the two.↩

^3. Hellenistic Greek pronunciation, also called ‘Restored Koine’, is a scholarly reconstruction of how Greek was pronounced in the period of Biblical Greek, including the New Testament era.↩

^4. A method of teaching that focuses on teaching grammar—the explicit description of a language—up-front, followed by one-way translation exercises from Greek to English. This method is open to pedagogical critique, but is still pre-dominant in theological colleges.↩