Thursday, July 19, 2007

Favourite Greek Grammar Poll Results

Last Wednesday, I asked the question, What is your preferred introductory Greek Grammar?. The results are as follows:

---------
William Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek: 62 votes (38%)

David Alan Black, Learn to Read Biblical Greek: 29 votes (18%)

Other (please say which in comments): 18 votes (11%)

J. W. Wenham, The Elements of New Testament Greek: 14 votes (8%)

J. Gresham Machen, New Testament Greek for Beginners: 13 votes (8%)

John H. Dobson, Learn New Testament Greek: 6 votes (4%)

Jeremy Duff, The Elements of New Testament Greek: 11 votes (7%)

Ian MacNair, Teach Yourself New Testament Greek: 6 votes (4%)

James Allen Hewitt, A Beginning and Intermediate Grammar: 4 votes (2%)

Ray Summers, Thomas Sawyer, Essentials of New Testament Greek: 2 votes (1%)

Total Votes: 165
---------

There were many useful comments, and they revealed that one important one I'd missed was Clayton Croy, A Primer of Biblical Greek, which would have picked up several votes and certainly made it into the top ten. There were other important contributions questioning the very idea of learning from a book specifically geared to "New Testament Greek".

A couple of things I picked up from this: (1) I had no idea just how popular Mounce's Introduction was until now, perhaps because it is very little used in the UK, if at all. (2) Duff is not yet supplanting Wenham, in spite of the fact that it is designed as its replacement, but that may just be a question of time.

Thanks to everyone who participated and commented.

One troubling thing I have realized too is that Bravenet polls appear to be introducing pop-ups to the site; two correspondents have been in touch with me about this. I am removing the poll now, and that should fix the problem. In future, I will look elsewhere for polls. (Blogger does not yet provide polls for those whose blogs are hosted on their own server, as the NT Gateway blog is).

2 comments:

Bryan L said...

That was an interesting poll. Regarding learning NT greek, based on the comments I decided to learn classical Greek instead of specifically koine/NT Greek. I picked up Athenaze. Hopefully it goes well. I wish I could find one that use Randall Buth's method. It seems like it would be effective.
Blessings,
Bryan L

Unknown said...

You may want to check PollDaddy for future polls. I have not used them, but they claim to be advertising free, and also able to be integrated into blogs.