day three of greek

As with the other two days of greek, we started with the lecturer reading a chapter of 2 Peter – it only has three chapters, so we had the whole book read to us (in English) by the end of our intensive "week".

Day three was the first day to begin with a test, to see what we’d learned so far. These tests don’t count towards our final mark, but they’re nonetheless a good indicator of how we’ve gone so far. It’s one thing to have a rough grasp of the rules of Greek that we’ve covered, but it’s quite another to be able to apply it – closed book – to randomly chosen sentences that must be translated in a short period of time.

Thanks to kel helping me with vocab and marking the exercises I was doing, it seemed to be okay: I didn’t get 100%, but I learned from my errors: I’m mixing up one ending with another.

It’s going to take us the whole year (from what I understand of the course) to learn a vocabulary of about 600 words. This doesn’t seem like much – we’ve already covered about 30, but the way that Koine Greek is structured means that every word has a lot of different forms. So far, this looks like different endings for the same word. Each ending has the word play a slightly different role in its sentence.

One of the things that most confused me when Greek students spoke about what they were studying was the way they’d talk about declension. Turns out, it’s not such a scary concept. A declension is just a noun with the correct suffix on it. The hard part is remembering which suffix is which.

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