Greek Week

No, I'm not talking about rushing a fraternity. I was thinking about how my weeks go with studying Greek and I thought I'd share this. Ride the roller coaster of emotions with me:


Wednesday
Work frantically to finish up translation and get ready for verbal quiz. Fortunately, I got things pretty well cemented last night, but should be reviewing my notes instead of blogging. I have class where much is explained.

Thursday
Pretty mild day. I am more focused on getting ready for my Old Testament quiz that night. I will review my vocab, however. I review vocab daily and add words as often as I can. I'm currently at over 400 words and down to words that occur at least 34 times in the New Testament. Believe it or not, I still have roughly 1800 words to learn if I want to know every word in the New Testament.

Friday
Start to read the textbooks. The books make sense at a certain level, but it is impossible to truly absorb all the material. For example, there are a LOT of uses of the genitive case in Greek.

Saturday and Sunday
Despair. I start to translate the week's passage and feel like I don't know what I'm doing. I look up words in the lexicon only to discover that it is some inflected form of a word I already know.

Monday
Deeper despair. How will I ever have this ready for the quiz?

Tuesday
Hope and lightness. I'm ready to be like Calvin and go up to the pulpit with nothing but my Greek text. After a few times through the passage it finally starts to click.

It really is exciting to learn something new like this. However, it is also challenging. I find that the thick grammar we use is actually quite interesting. I thought that it would put me to sleep, but it doesn't. I like the discussions of the various controversies regarding exegesis.

All this is to say that I need to keep pressing on.