the case of the attached article. Moreover, when you have a ready familiarity with the articles, you can more quickly identify the parts of the sentence. For example, if you know that τήν is the accusative feminine singular article, you will know immediately when you see it that you are looking at the direct object of the sentence.12 The more familiar you are with the articles, the more easily you can make out which part of a Greek sentence is which.
I recommend that you memorize the Greek article by reciting the words out loud, moving across the rows (not down the columns). Why should you read across rather than down? Because reading across highlights the case of each form, whereas reading down highlights the gender. Although both case and gender are important, knowing the case is usually more helpful for understanding the meaning of a Greek sentence.
So, I urge you to memorize the Greek article extremely well. Memorize it so well that the words just roll off your tongue without giving much thought to it. This level of familiarity with the Greek article will pay great dividends in the long run. (Besides that, spending time memorizing is a concrete way of making visible—or should I say, “audible”—progress toward your goal of refreshing your knowledge of NT Greek. Some days ahead, you may feel like you haven’t really learned anything going through all this. But at least you will be able to point to your memorization of the article as tangible progress.)
The article is the only thing in this book that I am asking you to memorize through “brute force.” The rest is accomplished by simply reading and focusing reflectively on your reading.
Exercise 8
Read the articles out loud several times. Read across the rows, not down the columns. Write them out several times. Continue working on these until you can recite them out loud in under thirty seconds.
As time permits, read the following verses. Use the articles to quickly locate the subjects and objects in each verse.
1. Luke 3:21–25
2. Rev 20:7–10
3. Eph 3:8–13
4. 1 John 5:5–12
12. You may remember that there are other uses of the cases than the ones we discussed so far, so it is possible that this is not the direct object. Nevertheless, this only serves to strengthen the point—it is all the more useful to know the articles so that you can have great confidence in your identifications of the cases of words.
Day 9: Noun Patterns (Again)
Congratulations on your progress through this forty-day journey! Are things beginning to come back to you? After yesterday’s focus on articles, plus the noun overview from a few days ago, you might be recognizing a lot of the noun endings that you encounter in your exercises and fifteen-minute bonus time. (You are keeping up with that fifteen-minute personal commitment, aren’t you? Oh! I said I wasn’t going to mention it again . . . oops!)
Well, it’s now time to tackle one of the big mental hurdles of the refresher—the dreaded third declension. If you had a typical journey through your beginning Greek course, you were doing great for the first five to seven weeks. You had conquered the notion that case endings, not word placement, determined which word was the subject, which word was the object, and so forth. You had become fairly good at recognizing the case endings for common masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. You were beginning to think that maybe all the horror stories about how hard Greek is were just not going to happen to you—but then third declension hit.
All of a sudden all those familiar endings started shifting on you. What used to be “for sure” a nominative, now just might be a genitive. And what your teacher had told you was always a genitive plural now shows up as a nominative singular! How can this be? Suddenly, panic began to set in, and you began to doubt you would ever be able to read Greek—real Greek.
If that scenario even remotely describes you, you may be feeling the third-declension panic rising within you again right now! You may have read the words “third declension” in the first paragraph and felt like giving up again. But if you have read this far, that means you have successfully fought off that first wave of panic! That’s a step in the right direction, because you really can handle these things. You can do it, and I’m here to help!
Let me begin by saying that you do not have to completely master the third declension in order to enjoy reading New Testament Greek. You don’t have to spend hours upon hours memorizing all the possible third-declension endings before you can begin to read the New Testament again. In fact, I estimate that you will be able to handle about 90 percent of third declension words if you simply remember the articles (which you’ve got down cold now) and the normal third declension endings. The last 10 percent you can get from context (usually) or by looking it up (only once in a blue moon). So you’ve already conquered the articles, and now let’s look at that important “normal” third declension ending pattern.
But first, let me introduce you to a friend of mine. Her name is Sashia Es-own-sea-as. She likes to have her name repeated out loud over and over every time someone thinks of her! Sashia Es-own-sea-as . . . Sashia Es-own-sea-as . . . Sashia Es-own-sea-as.
Okay, okay, so you’re thinking Sashia is my imaginary friend, but you’re only half right. I didn’t make her up (another Greek teacher did), but she’s not imaginary; she lives in the third declension endings: S-ASH-I-A ES-OWN-SEA-AS stands for
| Nom. Sing. | -ς | Nom. Pl. | -ες | |
| Gen. Sing. | -ος | Gen. Pl. | -ων | |
| Dat. Sing. | -ι | Dat. Pl. | -σι(ν) | |
| Acc. Sing. | -α | Ac. Pl. | -ας |
Once you are good friends with Sashia, it’s pretty easy to recognize her aliases, er, I mean . . . it’s pretty easy to remember the variants:
| Masc/Fem | Neut | |
| Nom. Sing. | -ς/- | - |
| Gen. Sing. | -ος | |
| Dat. Sing. | -ι | |
| Acc. Sing. | -α/ν | - |
| Nom. Pl. | -ες | -α |
| Gen. Pl. | -ων | |
| Dat. Pl. | -σι(ν) | |
| Ac. Pl. | -ας | -α |
Keeping Sashia Es-own-sea-as in mind, try naming the case of the following words. I’ve given the article to help out on most of them, since most of the time you’ll have the article available in the New Testament, too! Cover up the case column and name each case. Then check yourself.
| Case | Number | Case | Number | |||
| ὁ αἰών | n | s | τῶν πατέρων | g | p | |
| τῆς μητρός | g | s | τοῦ ἀμπελῶνος | g | s | |
| ἄνδρες | n | p | τῇ ἀναστάσει | d | s | |
| ὁ δράκων | n | s | ὁ ἀλέκτωρ | n | s | |
| ἡ ἀνάστασις | n | s | αἰῶνας | a | p | |
| τῇ ἐλπίδι | d | s | τοῖς σφραγῖσιν | d | p | |
| τὰς νύκτας | a | p | τοῦ αἰῶνος | g | s | |
| τῇ χειρί | d | s | πόδες | n | p | |
| τοῖς ἄρχουσιν | d | p | τοῦ ἀστέρος | g | s | |
| σώματα | n/a | p | τὴν σάρκα | a | s | |
How’d you do? About 90 percent? If so, you’re right on track. If you really want to go deeper into the third declension, that’s great. Here are the page numbers that cover third declension