Here are a few resources for learning New Testament Greek, based around the requirements of Oxford prelims and FHS.
First, you will need a nice Greek font, such as:
- Cardo—a beautiful book face with Greek and Hebrew character sets that have matching vertical metrics (along with numerous other ancient scripts of scholarly interest)
- Gentium Plus—produced by SIL, and probably the nicest Greek characters, but rather idiosyncratic Latin characters and hence less good for mixed Greek and English text
- SBL Greek—the least readable option
In my view, Cardo is the most attractive and readable typeface overall, and the other resources here, such as the flashcard decks, are setup to use it (or Gentium Plus) – though of course you could easily alter them to something else. Cardo is particularly recommended if you are writing and want to include Greek and Hebrew. This website uses Cardo if it is available.
If you are on a Mac and don’t want to install a new font, then Lucida Grande has a very readable set of Greek characters.
Vocabulary card decks
First you will need Anki, which is an excellent free flashcard program which will run on Windows, Mac or Linux. It doesn’t look particularly beautiful but works well. Then download a deck (I will add to this list over time):
- Duff – all the vocab from Duff’s grammar, tagged by chapter
- Mark 14.1-16.8 – all the words in the set text for NT Greek prelims 2011
- Mark 14.1-16.8 ex Duff – those 233 words which are not in Duff
- FHS 2 set text—the 564 words not in Duff, and in the FHS paper 2 set text (Matt 5-7, 26-28; Jn 1-6)
Grammar practice sheets
These are based on the paradigms at the back of Duff’s grammar. Print off a few copies of each sheet, and practice filling them in from memory – like flashcards but for the paradigms.
Currently the sheets cover the indicative verb, the subjunctive, imperative & infinitive verb, a brief principal parts sheet, and a full principal parts sheet.
Parsing practice
These are from the set texts. There are four columns: the first has the text, with one word per line; the second is blank; the third gives a full parse of each word; and the fourth the lexical form. Print off a copy, and practice filling in the middle column without reference to the third & fourth columns.
This will only be a useful exercise if you use it to learn by going back and revising the appropriate paradigm whenever you make a mistake. Using it as a shortcut for doing the class exercises will not make the exam a happy experience.
- Mark 14.1-16.8 (55 pages)
For more general parsing practice, Paradigms Master is a great website with parsing drills for both Greek and Hebrew. There is an offline version available with more paradigms, but even the free version is very useful:
