Hi GH,
You may want to google “online koine greek course.” There are quite a few, some of which are free. You may find something suitable to get you started.

Here is a free one in which you download each part as a pdf file:

is888.info/course_Adobe/course-acrobat.php

Hope you find something suitable!

Thanks a lot Brothers, I have started dipping into two things: D. Eric Williams learngreekfree.com as recommended by Paidion in another thread (Mr Williams has an extremely pleasant face and manner!), and the NT Greek University of Texas programme suggested by Randy above. it is very exciting, but I think the shapes of the letters of the alphabet will be my principal companion for some time!

Any further advice is welcome.
Blessed be Jesus!

The only other piece of advice is to practice every day. For me, I have software from Duolingo and Itunes podcasts from Coffee Break Spanish, French and German (i.e. these are by Radio Lingua in Scotland, by the way).

Hi GH,

Yes, that’s the most important thing to begin with. All teachers of Koine Greek teach the modern form of the alphabet:
α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ,ς τ υ φ χ ψ ω

But you might like know how the alphabet of the early scribes appeared, those who copied the writings around 150 A.D. For example, I have photocopies of papyrus 66, from around 150 A.D. That papyrus contains most of the gospel of John (although a few parts have been lost over the centuries). I copied the various letters of the alphabet from that document so that you can see how they actually formed the letters in those days. Everything was written in capitals, and there were no spaces between words. Also there was no punctuation except that some words were abbreviated by writing the first and last letter of a word and putting a stroke over those two letters. Also dots were sometimes used to indicate quotations, though the use of such dots seems to have been inconsistent. Notice that there is only one sigma.

Notice the upsilon in the ancient alphabet looks like the English “Y”. That must be the reason that upsilon is transliterated into English as “y”. For example the Greek word for “fire” would have looked something like this when written with the ancient alphabet:

But in modern Greek letters, the word for fire looks like this: “πυρ”

The English word “pyre” is derived from “πυρ” but the upsilon is not transliterated as “u” but rather as “y”.

Thanks a lot [tag]Paidion[/tag], I have begun the journey…it is hard, but fun!
Could you or anyone else recommend a good Greek dictionary for a Kindle or hard copy?
Also could you advise with the word Phos, how this should be written in Greek? Both Strong and the course at D. Eric Williams list it as φῶς, but the first letter seems to me to be Psi rather than Phi (according to Mr Williams alphabet!)…thus I am confused.
Bless you very much
Ghost Horizon

I have an even better recommendation:

The Essential Greek New Testament for the Absolute Beginner—Kindle Edition. It’s only $8.05 USD from Amazon.
This is an interlinear of the New Testament. You can click on any Greek word and get a definition of that word as well as a parsing.

amazon.com/Essential-Greek-Testament-Absolute-Beginner-ebook/dp/B00GU60RA6

The word is “φως” or in English characters “phōs”. It means “light.”

There is no such word as “ψως” in the Greek New Testament. I don’t know what “Mr. Williams alphabet” is. How does it differ from the regular Greek alphabet? Here is the Greek alphabet as I gave it in an earlier post:
α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ,ς τ υ φ χ ψ ω

What is there about Mr. Williams alphabet that would make you think that the word is “ψως” (psōs) rather than “φως”(“phōs”)? I don’t understand your confusion.

Thanks [tag]Paidion[/tag] especially for the Interlinear Recommendation!
I found a thread in which you - or perhaps someone else but I think it was you - had recommended a course by D.Eric Williams. This is a link to the alphabet he provides, where the phi is listed differently, and φ is the sign that D.Eric Williams gives for Psi!. When I try to copy and paste the sign for phi it produces either an English letter or a different sign, so I hope you can access the PDF that the link ‘greek alphabet’ leads to:
learngreekfree.com/main/downloads.php

Many thanks

There’s a $3 Kindle Orthodox Bible (effectively the Septuagint + the Textus Receptus) which does much the same thing. Always great to have multiple comparative resources (even if it’s, y’know, the TR… But the TR isn’t much different from the standard comparative texts.)

amazon.com/The-Complete-Koin … B00FL00JUK

I looked it up, GH. Eric Williams has a little different way of making phi and psi than is found in most Greek books.

The most common way is

[size=150]phi φ

psi ψ[/size]

I checked out that link above and I think it’s just a massive typo no one has picked up and corrected because [size=150]φ[/size] is simply the lower case version of [size=150]Φ[/size] as per HERE.

This is for Jason, Paidion and davo,

So can you guys read and translate Greek? In other words, someone hand you something written in Greek, you look at it with your eyes and can translate it with your mouth to English?

I know some people who can ‘speak’ Hebrew, and others who can kind of work out the words but would have a bit of difficulty fluently speaking it, yet they are pretty sharp in being able to go through Hebrew text and figuring things out.

Or do you look at a Greek manuscript and cross reference to a Greek > English translation aid, knowing the letters but not necessarily knowing how to verbally translate or pronunciate the words or maybe something different… I’d like to know, if possible.

The closest thing I know is when it shows the Greek word in Strongs! * I can copy and paste the Greek words with the best of them though*!!:lol:

Thanks,

Chad

That’s more me Chad… I do recognise lot of words though I wouldn’t claim proficiency at it, but I have many reference works (Hebrew as well) to explore and find given parsings etc, as well as what’s wonderfully available online these days. I must say though the good ole’ “Strong’s” as good as it is/was for its day is probably my last point of reference.

I always take the guidelines of the US Foreign Service Institute at Language Difficulty Ranking. They rank Greek and Hebrew as a category IV language, requiring 1100 hours or 44 weeks. Perhaps - because like Russian (which I’m familiar with), it has a different alphabet. Category V languages are the hardest (i.e. Mandarin, which I am familiar with), since it is based upon foreign characters. And it is based upon both a Roman westernized pronunciation system and a character structure. But from what I have learned from folks who attended seminary, they usually think Hebrew is harder to learn than Greek.

But the figures of the Foreign Service Institute can be misleading. Whether you take a two year college course or study that much on your own, you won’t become a master - unless you immerse yourself in a culture that practices that language. Let’s take Mandarin - for example. One Chinese teacher from China, fluent in Chinese and English (with a PhD in education from China), said there are about 50 K Chinese characters in existence. But you need to know about 2K to get by, in basic conversation and reading. The average Chinese person knows 3 - 4 K. In any language, this can be learned from using things like statistical frequency tables of words.

You might also visit a country where the language is not the primary one. Take Morocco, for example. If you don’t know Arabic, you might not get by. Except that they have many speaking either French or Spanish (both of which I’m familiar with). So if you know these languages, it’s easier to get around.

You also need daily practice. This is obtained by watching TV shows in foreign languages at WWI TV

I cannot read and translate modern Greek. I can read and translate parts of the New Testament (Hellenistic Greek), but there are still a lot of words with which I am unfamiliar and must look up. I don’t rely on Strongs alone, but consult several different lexicons. There are many verbs in the early Christian writings that are not found in the New Testament. Also there are so many forms of verbs that it is virtually impossible to memorize them all.

As for tenses, there is present, imperfect, 1st perfect, 2nd perfect, 1st aorist, 2nd aorist, liquid aorist, Then there are three voices, active, passive, and middle. Then there are five modes (for some odd reason, grammarians call these “moods”): indicative, subjunctive, infinitive, imperative, participles (very common). So I admit, I usually have to look up verbal forms in order understand their use.

By the way, did you know that the apostle Paul coined a word that is found nowhere else in Greek literature—ελαχιστοτερος (literally “leaster”)?
You find it in Ephesians 3:8.

Thanks davo and Paidion. I appreciate your info!

Wow Takes me back to college and seminary reading this thread Many long nights with classmates parsing one of Pauls elongated sentences lol Always so cool to hear of others experiences learning Greek Randy- any more fun cartoons??

I’m glad you asked

Well, I do not have a college or seminary education so I am at a disadvantage, but I have learned to adapt and find folks who are smarter than me and learn all I can from them!!

Street smarts and the Holy Spirit

Robert, you have an education and an opportunity, take it and run!!

Will be praying for you!

Have a good Year!!