Here is some more sound advice from Con Campbell regarding how to keep up your Greek:
Burn your interlinear
‘nough said in my opinion, but he explains his reasons, with a promise to unpack the relationship between this advice and software tools.
Jan 162009
Jan 132009
There is nothing worse than learning Greek again. Learn it once! Constantine Campbell has some sage advice on how to keep up with your Greek so you can spend time improving your Greek, rather than learning it over again each time you need it. Here is an excerpt:
From my background in music, I’m absolutely convinced that a little time practicing every day is much more beneficial than large chunks of practice interspersed by large chunks of inactivity. A little bit every day keeps it all ticking along. And it really only has to be a little. Half an hour a day reading Greek would be terrific, but even 10 minutes would be good. I know some guys who just aim to read one sentence of Greek a day. It doesn’t have to involve a big time commitment, just do a little every day.
So how can you do just a little per day? I have found the UBS Reader’s Greek NT to be very helpful in this regard. It defines uncommon words for you, and even parses difficult verbs, which keeps you reading Greek and not flipping through a lexicon.
For those counting, yes, this is my 10th (or so) plug for this book.
Jan 122009
The UBS Reader's Greek NT
For those trying to decide which Greek Bible they should purchase, Mounce has posted a helpful rundown of your options.
If you’re serious about learning and using Greek, I recommend you get two Bibles. (1) First, you need a Greek NT with a critical apparatus, either the UBS 4 or the NA 27 (both editions optionally include a Greek glossary). (2) Second, I heartily recommend the UBS Reader’s Greek NT. It will make actually reading the NT in Greek all that much more enjoyable.
Mounce also mentions a black-leather “stealth” NA that he uses. I was not able to find this. Anyone know where to get one? I always do feel a little self-conscious using my GNT in church…
Update: Phil Gons additionally recommends (see the comments) this post, which in turn links to this article describing the differences between the NA27 and the UBS4. The article will be of particular interest to those using Logos’s Bible Software.
Lee Irons has been busy. His Syntax Notes of the whole NT are now complete. Everyone interested in the Greek New Testament should download these handy guides. You can find the links on this page.
Dec 132008
Fostertribe has finished compiling his list of Bible Software reviews. This is a very handy guide to (largely introductory) Bible software. Bibleworks doesn’t make the list, nor do a couple of online tools, but the guide is very helpfully organized. Anyone interested in an introductory desktop program for reading and searching the Bible should check it out.
For an in depth look at the upcoming version of Bibleworks, check out this series of posts.
For online software, go here and here.
And anyone interested in a quick and handy tool for searching and listening to the Bible online should read my Ubiquity guide.
Awhile back I posted a four-part series on the advantages of Unicode for typing out Biblical Greek and Hebrew. I am linking these posts here so those interested have a one-stop shop for the whole series.
These posts provide a detailed but understandable explanation of what Unicode is, how to set up Greek and Hebrew Unicode keyboards, and what Fonts work best for each language. Enjoy.
I found this post interesting. It argues that in an age of Wikipedia and Google memorization is unimportant.
According to Tapscott, the existence of Google, Wikipedia, and other online libraries means that rote memorization is no longer a necessary part of education. “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is,” Tapscott told the Times. “Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorize that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google,” he said.
Even if we make an exception for language learning (vocabulary in particular), I think this perspective needs to be nuanced.
Also from the article:
Today’s students are growing up in a world where multi-tasking has
them completely immersed in digital experiences. They text and surf the
net while listening to music and updating their Facebook page. This “continuous partial attention” and its impacts on our brains is a much-discussed topic these days in educational circles. Are we driving distracted or have our brains adapted to the incoming stimuli?A new book on the subject, “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” states that our exposure to the net is impacting the way our brains form neural pathways. Wiring up our brains like this makes us adept at filtering information, making snap decisions, and fielding the incoming digital debris, but sustained concentration, reading body language, and making offline friends are skills that are fading away.
Your thoughts?
Nov 242008
At a dog-friendly beach in Holland
Some ideas are easily represented in any language, but more often than not translation requires sensitivity to a wide variety of often competing influences.
I just listened to a nice little story on NPR about the “Art of Translation.”
Bea Basso, who came from Italy to the United States in 2000 to study and work in theater, has done a lot of translating from Italian to English. She says that the choice of a single word can determine the arc of an entire work.
“There is no such thing as a literal translation, by nature of choosing one word or another, you influence the next step,” she says.
Listen to the whole story.
Because no two languages are alike, and since the cultural differences surrounding a language are often more than meets the eye, translation is more an art than a science. Translation always involves something lost and also something gained–some of the original is gone, but there is also often additional meaning in the translation that was not there in the text being translated. For proof, type in some text here. The results can be comic.
This is true of all translation, but with Greek (or Hebrew, or any other “dead” language) the matter is complicated by the fact that the original culture is no longer there for us to study. Translation suddenly intersects with historical research, sociology, theology, and a wealth of other disciplines, which is one reason it is so important for pastors to learn Greek.
Nov 212008
The folks over at BibleWorks have announced the release of the eighth iteration of their software product. The announcement includes an extensive list of upgrades and new features. Read the whole announcement. Here are some highlights:
New Features
The biggest advances appear to be in the area of searching and analysis (rather than text handling or diagramming, though there are a few additions here as well). They have added a new phrase matching tool, as well as some other search improvements:
Over lunch in mid-2007, we asked ourselves, “How could we find all verses which are similar to each other?” Out of this discussion came the Phrase Matching Tool and Related Verses Tool. The new Phrase Matching Tool takes your current verse and finds all verses containing similar phrases. The new Related Verses Tool finds all verses using some of the same words from the current verse.
They are also adding in an “External Resource Manager” that lats you organize and collect your massive storehouse of documents, PDFs, and images into Bibleworks’s main interface. Personally I use Zotero for this, but some might like this feature.
New Databases
Two additional modern grammars are now available in the suite: Waltke/O’Connor for Hebrew and Wallace for Greek. The complete Early Church Fathers is also available (only the Apostolic Fathers are available in BW 7).More importantly, Bibleworks will finally include the Greek Text of the OT Pseudepigrapha (BW 7 included the Apocrypha, but not the Pseudepigrapha), which is a much needed addition. The Targum of the Psalms will also be added, though only in English.
Thoughts
There are a couple of features that would motivate me to upgrade from BibleWorks 7, and only one of them appears to be included: the OT Pseudopigrapha. I would really like to see Bibleworks include a robust semantic diagramming module (Logos has one). And I wish BDAG was bundled with the rest of the suite (though that is Chicago’s fault). BibleWorks also needs to seriously improve it’s map functionality (the map module is excessively sluggish on my computer, and my computer is rarely excessively sluggish). The most serious need in my opinion is full-fledged Unicode support. They claimed this would be available in Bibleworks 7, and while oen can certainly export text in Unicode, it is not native built it. ASCII is dead as a doornail. There should be no ASCII text visible in BibleWorks, especially since it attempts to handle so many languages.
I am optimistic, but need a couple of more features explained before I am ready to purchase. Stay tuned for updates!
Purchase
Bibleworks 8 can be purchased by visiting the Bibleworks site. Special upgrade prices are available for those with Bibleworks 6 or Bibleworks 7. Bibleworks will not ship out until mid-December, however, so you still have some time.
One of the advantages of using Linux is the ability to tweak everything (everything!) to your individual needs. So if you are not satisfied with the layout of you Greek keyboard, you can change it, or download someone else’s changes.
Vern Poythress has a simplified Greek layout available here, for example, which places the breathing marks over the parentheses keys.
I also recently discovered a layout by Simos Xenitellis, which supports a much larger set of Greek characters all without changing your layout:
This post is about writing Greek Polytonic using a new combined Greek layout that supports Greek, Greek Polytonic/Attic (ᾂᾷᾰᾱᾢᾥ) and Archaic (ͼϾϡϠϲϹϟϞ…).
Follow these instructions to set it up. If you want to tweak your own keyboard layout (in Linux), there is a guide for that too.
If you’re just getting started and want to add Greek to your Linux desktop, follow this guide. For Windows, try this one.
