How to Use This Website

Here are some tips to help you get the most out of this website!

Make sure you have the basics down first

There are lots of resources for learning the elements of Biblical Greek. Laleo Language is starting by focusing on developing the guided immersion technique; so we won’t try to duplicate other resources here.

For beginners, here are the main components you should be familiar with:

  • How to pronounce Greek letters
  • Unlike English, all nouns and adjectives are “inflected”
  • What a “case” means: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, and Vocative
  • What the Aorist, Perfect, Imperfect, Future, Subjunctive, and Infinitive tenses mean
  • How Aorist and Perfect participles work
  • That some prepositions change meaning based on the case of the noun to which they attach.

Essentially, you need to go from “Koine Greek text + parsing information + gloss” to “rough meaning”.

You can get the above through a course or a book. Here are some useful resources:

Tools for studying a selection

Laleo Language will choose what content you study, but actually doing the studying is up to you. The following are some tools that you can use. Not all tools need to be used for each verse; practice using them and you’ll get a feel for when they’d be helpful and when you can skip them. The key thing is that by the time you click “Mark Studied”, you should be able to read the sentence and have it make sense to you at that moment.

  • Look at the title, to get a feel for what part of the New Testament it’s from.

  • First pass: Skim through the text. See if your brain will give you a “sense” of what the meaning of the text is. Also see if you can identify the meaning of the root word behind each individual word.

  • Second pass: Try to identify the lexical form (aka ‘headword’) and the inflection (case or conjugation) of each word in the text. Then double-check your knowledge by mousing over the word to bring up the headword, parsing, and “gloss” for that word. Finally, try to identify the meaning of the text again.

  • Look at English translations: Look up an English translation of the text in a literal translation, such as the ESV or Young’s Literal Translation. Also look at interlinear Bibles. esv.org has both the ESV, and a decent interlinear. Young’s Literal Translation as well as a number of other English translations are available on biblegateway.com.

  • Dig into key words: Look up headwords dictionaries. Online resources include Wiktionary, Mounce’s Greek Dictionary, biblicaltext.com, etc. Look up the headword, see other places it’s used, consider the etymology.

  • Ask an LLM to explain the grammar. GPT-4 is pretty good, but requires payment for access. My experience with claude.ai is pretty good as well; it’s currently free with access limitations. Below is a suggested prompt:

    You are a system producing grammar commentary for people studying Biblical Greek. For each Greek sentence given, explain the grammar in a friendly and helpful way. Make sure to include the lexical form of declined words; and a literal translation at the end. If there are any grammar constructions not familiar to English speakers, such as articular infinitives or genitive absolute, please note them.

    If any questions are asked, be sure to clearly correct any errors or misconceptions.

  • Now having a full understanding of the meaning and the grammar, go back through the text and read it again, imagining it being said out loud by the original author directly to you. Add whatever inflection you think makes sense. Remember, the purpose here is to engage your language brain, not to be accurate; you’ll never have to actually speak or understand someone speaking the original form of Ancient Greek.

Making the algorithm most effective

The algorithm can be most effective when done in “batches” of 5-10 verses at a time. If you have time to do 10 verses every day, you’ll make progress quickly. If you don’t have that time, consider doing 10 verses 3 days a week. In any event, I’d try to set aside time at least 3 days a week, no matter how much time you have.

That said, it never hurts to do more: So if you find yourself with a minute here or there to do a verse or two on your phone, do study. But try to set aside time to do a minimum on a few days a week.