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By Clint Archer

Translating Greek to English is not the same as reading Greek. We covered that last week.

Today I want to suggest some practical strategies for improving fluency of reading Greek. I gleaned most of this from an inspiring and helpful break-out session offered at the Greek for Life Conference in Louisville, Kentucky last month.  These insights were offered by the energetic, knowledgeable, and delightfully candid Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor, Dr Brian Vickers. At times it wasn’t clear if he was tailoring his advice for language students or cyclists training for the Tour de France. But these strategies obviously work for any grueling endurance endeavor.

Fernando’s Secret.

Dr Vickers told us about a former student of his, who we’ll call Fernando. This young man came to seminary with absolutely no knowledge of Greek, but as soon as he learned the alphabet he began to read, and read, and read. At first he recognized nothing but common conjunctions and words that sounded like their English cognates (kardia sounds like “cardiac” and means “heart”). As his Greek classes started filling in the blanks with vocabulary lists, lessons on grammar and syntax, and explanations of morphology, Fernando’s base was solid and his fluency accelerated. Before the end of formal Greek training at the MDiv level, he could read Greek significantly more fluently with higher comprehension, than any Greek PhD candidate. His secret? He just read Greek. All. The. Time.

Vickers was clear that the strategies that follow don’t work if this is all you do. But he avers that to become proficient in reading and thinking in Greek, you need to be doing at least this. It is the base, the foundation on which all your vocabulary and grammar studies will stand. I realized as he was talking that this is what I had neglected in my studies. I had memorized for the quiz and exam, the paradigms, vocabulary, and rules of translation. But I wasn’t reading Greek; I was analyzing it. And that was enough for years. But now I want to read, think, and enjoy New Testament Greek. If that describes you, read on…

Assess the Damage.

Start with an honest assessment of where you need to begin. Do you need to relearn the alphabet (quick test, what letter comes before and after Xi?).

How many minutes of Greek did you read this past day, week, and month? If you did that for the next twelve months, how would your skill improve? My honest answer was that the amount I was reading daily and weekly was not enough to produce improvement, no matter how long I did it. I needed more volume.

When he qualified that “reading” doesn’t count if you’re using helps or doing it for sermon preparation, my number fell to zero. For someone who wants to read the Bible for enjoyment and devotion, I realized I had been doing nothing to attain that goal.

Resist Buying an App.

Vickers showed us a picture of an Olympic cyclist with medal, and another picture of him as a teenager, with his first bike. It had no tires. But he rode it everywhere. He did what he could with what he had at the time. Most Greek students will spend time on Amazon and the app store looking for the perfect new grammar book, laminated paradigm charts, flashcards, learning apps. It is a black hole of futility this early in the process.  Use what you have. All you need for the first month is a Greek New Testament. If you have Machen on your shelf, that’ll do. If you have a coffee-stained, Dana & Mantey… that’ll do! Just start reading.

Build a base.

The point of this is to build a habit on which to add other studies. Vickers swears that if you start with seven minutes a day, five days a week, for a month, you will experience success. Why seven? Because it’s not ten, but it’s also not only five. In other words, it’s enough to get a chunk done, but not that much that you will be tempted to skip a day.

7 minutes x 5 days = 35 minutes a week. That’s nearly two and a half hours a month, which is a zillion times more than I was doing before.

What counts as reading? Just mouthing the sounds (preferably aloud, unless you have to do it on the subway or in your cubicle at work), and not stopping to look up anything. Just read. You are hardwiring a sense of the syntax, the sounds, the cadence, the structure of the language. You might not understand 80% of what you are reading, but your brain is learning something. The scaffolding is going up. Just trust the process.

Be Consistent.

Show up. Just do your seven minutes every day for a month and see what happens. Don’t break the habit before it begins. Pick a regular time and place, set a timer on your phone, put it on airplane mode, and start reading until it tells you you’re done.

Add work.

After your seven minutes is done, and those unfamiliar vocab words or verb forms are driving you nuts, now is the time to add study. It’s optional. The base is non-negotiable. It’s a duty. But the extra work will be a delight now, not a chore.  It will feel so satisfying to look up a word and when you read the same verses tomorrow you will know more and more and you will want to read more and more. That is why I read the same passage each day. As I read faster I get more verses in. Every few days I change to a new passage by a different writer, so I get a feel for the different styles.

When your base is solid, you can start to increase the time incrementally. So instead of seven minutes, spend nine, and then fifteen, and shoot eventually for a half-hour a day or more. Just take it slow. Or spend more time looking up words after your seven minutes. Just don’t stop the bare minimum of seven.

Add to your plan the memorization of a verb paradigm, maybe one a month to start. You will start to see the endings and augments all over the place. When it’s stuck in your mind, add another.

Be patient.

You are not translating yet, you are first learning to read. Comprehension will come. Remember “Fun with Dick and Jane”? Slow, faltering, leads to fluency over time. Measure your progress over long periods of time; months not days. Six months from now you will compare your first week of stuttering incoherence with less than 10% comprehension, to an unprecedented rapidity of recognition, improved pronunciation, dexterity with accented emphasis, and noticeable growth in reading comprehension.

Be merciful.

It’s okay to skip a day or two. No need for self-flagellation. If you get down about missing a day, you may resign your efforts. You will not lose what you’ve gained in 48 hours. But get back on the horse as quickly as you can, lest it leave you in the dust. Again. 

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