Mail Call - 4

7 August, 2018

Adam Baumann

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

2018 Summer Greek

30 July - 3 August, 2018

Both midterms are behind the class now. By 10 August we will have completed all 42 chapters of the textbook. One textbook completed in 9 weeks. From little to no knowledge of Greek to 18 men being able to understand the Greek text read any given chapel service.

Things in Greek have gone from mildly challenging to at times floundering. The last two days of July resulted in quite the "hiccup:" -μι verbs. These "me" verbs are old in form, as in older than the version of Greek used by the New Testament authors. As such, they've got some peculiarities. So instead of learning a new ending or such to add to the stuff already learned, we've learned whole new charts. Greek verbs are usually declined following one of two patterns, each with about 190 forms.

We learned three more versions of these patterns in as many days. Actually, its worse than that, since the form learned on the first day of August isn't just one of these old "me" verbs, but one that has both "strong" and "weak" forms of one of the past tenses. At this point I am pretty sure we have learned over 1000 potential forms.

All this on top of three different noun declensions, at least three adjective forms, variations to everything, "marker" words for clauses and phrases, prepositions, and uses of different cases, both logical and confusing.

On the plus side, our English grammar has never been better.

The final test is on 16 August, just over a week away. These ten weeks have gone by quickly, and few of us actually thought we'd be able to use the language with any level of proficiency or confidence. Clearly the method works.

We have our class schedules for the entire year, and know what books we will need. It is a daunting list, so the couple weeks allotted between the end of Summer Greek and the start of the Fall Quarter will be much appreciated.

Sorry for the long gap between these posts. It has seriously been that busy.