New Testament Greek Primer

For years, J. Gresham Machen's Koine Greek primer was the standard. It revolutionized the way Greek had been taught for centuries by compressing an entire introductory course into a relatively small volume, and by approaching the subject in a systematic, logical order. S.M. Baugh's New Testament Greek Primer further updates the primer approach and combines text and charts with workbook pages to give the serious student everything he needs to get started.

How Does This Work?

This is a one-year course. It was designed for use by college students, though most high schoolers will be able to handle it as well. There are 30 lessons, each with a number of sections so students aren't trying to learn too much all at once. Since memorization is at the heart of learning a new language, the author has included a variety of tips and suggestions for learning the material. He identifies two types of students—essentially those who work too hard and those who don't work hard enough—and explains that neither approach will help you learn. Truly learning the language involves lots of hard, often tedious work, and the best approach is to work consistently on a day by day basis.

The first lesson introduces the alphabet and all sounds one encounters in Greek, diphthongs, vowels, accents and breathings, and punctuation. The pace is fairly quick, though not overwhelming. In the second lesson students are already learning vocabulary words and first declension endings, and it doesn't really let up from there; by the end, students are translating actual New Testament sentences. Everything is carefully and clearly explained, and the text is entirely self-contained (there are no teacher materials, flashcards, etc.).

Answers to all exercises are included in the back of the book, as are paradigms for all the conjugations and declensions for all parts of speech. These paradigms list in chart form the endings for representative words in all their forms, with the gender, number and case of each form clearly identified. These are very helpful for memorization, but should not take the place of thoroughly studying the text, as the rules and reasons of grammar are there explained.

This is a student-directed course, though of course any help you can offer will be beneficial. Students who complete this course will have a thorough understanding of elementary Greek, enough to lead into more advanced study. You may want to buy a set of flashcards to use with the consumable book as Baugh only provides the 300 vocabulary words that comprise 80% of the text in the New Testament.

Our Honest Opinion:

The idea of the primer is to get students started toward full understanding, not to lead them all the way to that goal. As an introductory text, this one does an excellent job. If your only concern is to study Greek in order to improve your Bible study skills, you probably don't need to go any further. If you want mastery of the language, however, you'll need to find another course for further study. Baugh has written a First John Reader for intermediate students, or you could switch to the third year of Elementary Greek. Most study beyond that point will have to be done in a college course.