Biblical Greek: the best beginning Greek grammar of 2020?

This year has been a great year for new beginning Greek Grammars, and this new Grammar by Rob Plummer and Benjamin Merkle is another great contribution. But no grammar suits everyone and there are some things in this grammar that I would adjust a little. In this video we take a look at what is different with this grammar and how it strikes a great balance between many of the grammars that it competes with. Find out more by watching! Watch until the end to find out how you can go through this grammar with me.

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[bma]

Update: Since this video went live, B&H (the publsher) and Dr. Plummer have both confirmed that there are in fact plans to put this grammar AND Going Deeper with New Testament Greek on Logos. Not sure about Accordance yet. See the comments below for Dr. Plummer's comments.

[cross-examininggod]

I recently purchased this grammar, and just finished chapter 2. I like it so far and it has great resources online to supplement the book!

[jasoncampbell]

This may already be in the comments but the structure with the Grammar (Nom Gen Dat Acc with First then second Dec) is how Machen set up his grammar. I first learned Greek from Machen’s book and if I remember correctly he starts with the second declension and then the first and later the third. Interesting! Thanks for the vid!

[davidchilds]

I hope you were aiming this review at Greek teachers - as a potential user, the jargon went right over my head.

[doughook]

This is really cool grammar. I ordered it
February 2020. Amazon would not ship to New Zealand, but with Youshop, not a problem, it just arrived yesterday in Portland Oregon, now paid the air freight and tax to Auckland. May see it in 10 to 20 days, as shortage of aircraft coming to NZ. I confess, I bought the ebooks kindle version as well. I started learning NT greek in 1970, and still learning it.

[BiblicalStudiesandReviews]

Wow! This is a really awesome grammar.

[stevehobby]

Dr Rob Plummer and MNTG seems like a winning combination! I really enjoy Daily Dose of Greek and I really enjoy all the materials and videos of MNTG so if you are working together that is great. I also like the fact that Dr. Plummer has done a Spanish language Daily Dose of Greek as more resources are greatly needed for the Latin American church. Muchas Gracias Darryl :-)

[neilellson]

I like that you are clearly very independent with your review. Despite being sponsored by Logos and having done several interviews with Dr Plummer you still point out that Logos is not selling it and that although there are many great improvements over other grammars, there are still areas where you feel it falls short. This gives me confidence in your reviews.
I haven’t read through much yet but will be pleased by the take on verbal aspect. So far I preferred Mounce’s explanation of stems of nouns ending in ο, α, η, or a consonant to determine declension and to simplify case endings. Plummer and Merkle’s approach of learning endings consisting of the noun stem vowel and true ending combined seems counter intuitive and requires the learning of three forms for the first declension: those ending in α, η, and where α does not follow ρ, ι, or ε such as δοξα. As you say there are strengths in the morphological approach and the linguistic approach. This grammar may bridge the gap better but I think we will still unfortunately get our feet wet at some point, to extend the metaphor. I suppose it is a tough call as to what to teach in first year and what to teach in second to avoid overload. Personally I think the biggest hurdle for new students is the amount of word form changes that have to be learned and the easier this can be made the better. On the other hand correct and up to date information on verbal aspect and middle voice needs to be mentioned early, but perhaps leave the deeper implications for translation for the second year.

[davidclavey]

So I took your advice in another YouTube and bought a second hand "Basics of Biblical Greek 4" (BBG), but while I was waiting for it to arrive I looked at this Grammar "Beginning with New Testament Greek" (BNTG), as you can read the first 5 chapters for free on Amazon "look inside". So I read all the introduction and began to do Chapter 1, what was very good was all the supporting video's and material on the Web. I am tempted to buy a BNTG as well if I get stuck on BBG. From what I have read and watched the BNTG looks like it will be better for me, self taught, because of all the extra's included.

[luker]

I have really enjoyed using this grammar since it came out in August!

[vincetarver]

Thanks Darryl. I just purchased the kindle version.

[davidrogers]

Thank You for this video! I recently converted my primary grammar I have been using to this one. One of many reasons because of the massive additional resources he has on his website. One additional resource I would like to see is an Anki vocabulary package with for the Greek audio for all the chapters and exercises.

[Aaron_Wells]

This is an excellent grammar in most respects. A few comments so far. It's treatment of 3rd declension nouns is too brief in my view. Schwandt and Mounce both do a more thorough treatment. Like most grammars, it waits till the very end to deal with athematic verbs, which I never understood given the large number of occurrences these verbs have in the New Testament. Given that just about every New Testament grammar falls short in this respect, I cannot really fault the authors too heavily. Finally, it is just my preference that the vocabulary load would be a bit more for first-year, although I understand why the authors have restricted vocabulary to the most high frequency words in general. I personally would opt for between 450 and 600 words for the first year.
On the other hand, this book is so creatively designed, and it's so exciting and inspirational to read through, , that I would definitely teach with it alongside some kind of supplementary material for a first-year student. The treatment of participles is top-notch, along with the treatment of the perfect. Treatment of verbs in general is superior to most other grammars. I also really appreciate that the exercises are not over glossed like they are in Mounce. I could never teach out of Mounce because of the two paths he forges, leaving his exercises way ahead of the level that the student is at in the early stages of the text. This new grammar has excellent exercises directly from scripture that are level-appropriate, along with some useful morphology exercises. However, I would really want more grammar and syntax exercises. For example, the first aorist lesson has 10 parsings prior to the translation exercises. I think students learn sometimes even better when they have to reduplilcate these forms, although not in excess. I would be interested in how many students come out of this grammar feeling prepared for Plummer's intermediate text.

[dennis.j]

In John chapter 3 verse 3, why is the word "ἄνωθεν" translated to "again", when the actual words meaning is "from above"?

I have found this definition "from above" of the word "ἄνωθεν" in several lexicons.

[ryanmcgrath]

Hi Bro. Thanks for the video reviews.

I am currently teaching myself Greek by using different grammars. I am probably breaking all the rules on how to learn Greek, but believe it or not, this is really working for me. Somehow, reading from different styles of teachers helps the information to stick.

Currently I am using:

Mounce - Beginning Greek.
Summers - essentials to greek
Machen - NT Greek for Beginners (free pdf)
W E Vine - NT Greek Grammar (dated 19:30).

I am interested in your thoughts on David Alan Black's grammar. Have you reviewed this before?

[grahambennett]

Thanks. I have it on pre-order from Amazon UK but they don't start shipping till Friday. Sadly the Parse Greek app you recommend still has not been fixed to run on Android 10 and both my Android devices have updated to 10 so I can't use it any more.

[tycNvk]

Thank you for all your uploads. They are all very insightful. In this video you divided the grammars into those with pedagogical approach and those which are linguistically driven. Could you rank the grammars in each of these categories please? Or do you have videos on that already? :)

[CDUTT]

Hey, would you prefer this one over Reading Koine Greek? Iv'e gone through Duff's Elements of NT Greek, and looking for a second beginner Greek. Thanks.

[yesseniaberroeta]

Hello Brother Ramey, I have a syntactic question regarding Romans 12:17. What is the syntactic function of κακον and κακού. That confuses me a little. It looks like the accusative is Direct object, but what about the other. Could you advise me, please?

[SteveM]

I wasn't able to commit to your most recent class launch in time so I've just started working through the Mounce book on my own and having the workbook solutions available is critical for checking my work and understanding. I don't see anything like that for this text. Am I just overlooking it? Either way, I might give your trial run of this text a go if things aren't too crazy with the kids back "in school".