Bridging the Grammar Gap

Voice, tense, mood, participles . . . learning biblical Greek is tough enough with a firm grasp of the building blocks of English. But that's just where many first-year students falter. Through many years in the classroom, veteran language instructor Gary Long has learned that it's in the first semester that many students get bogged down in grammatical basics. Soon confidence, morale—and then grades—start to slip. A growing number of students have forgotten, or never learned, the fundamental grammatical concepts needed for studying Biblical Greek. Explanations of these concepts in standard Greek textbooks are either too skimpy or too complex. This practical resource will help.

Written for learners with little or no formal study of grammar, this invaluable complement to standard classroom textbooks clarifies English grammar in order to more effectively teach concepts that are specific to New Testament Greek. Arranged to supplement teaching grammars, each chapter takes up individual concepts, first explaining how the concept works in English, then illustrating its use in biblical Greek.

Abundant English and Greek examples illustrate each concept, most of them visually analyzed. Glossaries and translations help students comprehend the Greek words in each example.

"Gary Long has written a book on a topic that most people would prefer to avoid. We all know that grammar is 'good for us,' but we cringe at the prospect at having to relearn everything we learned (or were supposed to learn) in grade school. Add to that the study of a second language - and one as challenging as New Testament Greek - and you have a recipe for disaster. Enter Grammatical Concepts 101 for Biblical Greek. I rate this book as four stars (out of five) because it almost achieves the impossible - it makes grammar as painless as possible. I will definitely recommend it as a reference tool to my Greek students. If anyone wants a concise, easy-to-understand definition of any given part of speech (both in Greek and English), it's all here!" —David Alan Black, Professor of New Testament and Greek, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of Learn to Read New Testament Greek and It's Still Greek to Me