Learning Greek is Great!!!

My oldest child was upset today because her Greek work was so hard and she was so tired and couldn't do any other "school" work today!!! I am so pleased!! We have been using a program written by Cristine Gatchell called Elementary Greek. My oldest finished her first year workbook a few months ago and has started on the second year, and I have too for that matter since I'm learning along with her. It was pretty frustrating at times that first year, because we had to take about 18 mos. instead of just 30 weeks as the book is set up. But we were thorough and we didn't move on until we understood everything in the first year book ( although we could use some continued vocabulary review), but other than that, we got it. We understand nouns, verbs, nominative case, genetive case, adjectives, prepositions and number. In Greek the ending of the noun will change according to it's part of speech in the sentence, so you really have to understand exactly what it is you are saying in order to get the right endings on all the nouns and the adjectives for that matter. So we spent a lot of time memoriziing and reciting noun endings for masculine nouns, neuter nouns and feminine nouns. Also, the articles and adjectives match whichever ending is being used. So there really is a lot to it and there is a ton to learn. And my little girl gets it!! It is hard brain work, but her brain is being wired and trained to think and to understand grammar and speech and meaning. It is also neat how many of our English words come from Greek!!

So anyway, after being excited that she is tired, but successful, I thought about all the things we've learned and learned well from just this first year of Greek and I grabbed the 3rd year book to look at where we'll be in approximwtely 2 years and we'll know all about the verbs and all the tenses. I'm so excited!! It's really hard to learn a lot of these from English because the endings just don't change. We express the same tenses like I was looking in the store would be something like imperfect past or something ( I haven't learned it yet) but in Greek the endings would change according to the tense and use so it is a little more clear and necessary to understand grammar than it is for us English speakers even if we did learn to diagram sentences.

Now that is an education!!! I wish I had learned Greek, Latin and Hebrew as a teenager or kid. Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to read the Bible in its original language?, as well as all the other great books like the Iliad. I bet it sounds so much better in Greek!!

Anyway, today was a nice acknowledgment day. All this hard work is starting to pay off, even if we never did mop the floor last week!! Maybe tomorrow, but probably not, we've got to get our Christmas presents mailed!!!!