Hey, Andrew!! Teach me some Greek!

by Karen Mohs

Greek 'n' Stuff

This is a Christian program for teaching Koine Greek to children of all ages. Although this program is designed to begin using it with younger children, you can still start with teens. Skip the Reader and Level One with older students and begin with Level Two. Plan to move quickly through Levels Two and Three then concentrate on Level Four.

Level Two reviews all of the letters that were taught in Level One.

By page 37 (out of 162 pages), students are learning words through a variety of exercises. They work with flashcard recognition for both letters and words. (Vocabulary words are repeated and reviewed from book to book, but a few words used for letter or word recognition don’t repeat in every book.)

Level Three condenses presentation of letters and sounds to 10 pages then concentrates on vocabulary for the remaining 187 pages. While the earlier levels basically use a memorization and drill approach, this level begins to introduce some grammar. Since it is designed for early- to mid-elementary grades it does not assume that students have even learned English grammar. For example, simple verb conjugations are introduced, but without any labels referring to person, number, or tense. By the end of the book, students are translating sentences in their workbooks.

At the back of the book are an alphabet chart, glossary, declension charts for second declension masculine and neuter nouns, a conjugation chart for present active indicative verbs, and flash card pages.

Level Four begins with a review of the alphabet (6 pages), vocabulary (10 pages), and Greek grammatical principles (16 pages, now with English grammatical terminology introduced.) The Greek article is taught in all three persons and both numbers. Short and long vowels, diphthongs, breathings, iota subscripts, and syllable names and length are introduced in preparation for the general rules of Greek accent, followed by the special rules for noun and verb accent. Word order and punctuation are discussed. All four feminine declensions are presented. Additional vocabulary is interspersed throughout this 170-page workbook, again with varied activities and sentence translation practice. At the back of the book are Greek-English and English-Greek glossaries, 32 flash card pages, Flash Card Tips, and charts for the alphabet, articles, conjugations, declensions and accent rules.

Level Five covers masculine first declension nouns, adjectives of the first and second declensions, adverbs, prepositions, and more vocabulary. The vocabulary pronunciation for both Levels Five and Six are contained on a single cassette tape.

Level Six presents “the imperfect tense, the future tense, personal pronouns, voice (middle and passive), the ‘being verb’ (present active), enclitics, and deponents.”

According to the publisher’s website, Level Seven (the newest level which I haven’t seen) teaches “additional pronouns (interrogative, indefinite, relative, indefinite relative, demonstrative, reflexive, reciprocal), substantives, principal parts, parsing, first and second aorist indicative verbs (all voices), future passive indicative verbs, perfect indicative verbs (all voices), contraction & contract verbs, third declension nouns, participles, genitive absolute, and infinitives.” By the end of the book students should be able to translate and write Greek sentences and parse and translate the first two chapters of I John.

Answer keys are separate for each level and are available in two formats: one is a complete student book with answers while the other is answers only. Workbooks are consumable and you need one for each student. Quiz and exam packets with answer keys are available for each level, although these are optional. Flash card pages are included in each student workbook, but nicer, ready-to-use flash cards are available for each level as Flashcards on a Ring sets. Prices vary depending upon the number of flash cards per set. Optional Pronunciation Tapes present recorded pronunciations of words taught in each workbook. Each tape covers two levels, so there are three Pronunciation Tapes.