Lesson 1 | Introduction & Vocab
Four out of Five
You’ve already learned many Greek vocabulary words—250 of them, in fact, if you’ve finished Greek I-III. Of course, that doesn’t mean you remember them all; you need to keep reviewing them, and to keep reading in the Greek NT for them to stick in your mind and become permanent fixtures there.
And there are many more words in the Greek NT! There are about 138,000 words in the Greek NT, made up of 5,400 unique words, the vast majority of which occur very few times. But if you add up the occurrences of the words used 50 times or more, plus a few other important words (i.e. what we teach in Greek I-IV), they account for about 114,000 words—that is, 80% of all the words in the Greek NT!¹ So you'll soon be able to recognize 4 out of 5 words that you read in the Greek NT, as long as you know how to parse nouns and verbs, which you’ll be able to do completely by the end of this course.
But we also want to help you increase your vocabulary acquisition beyond our courses. In Greek I, we recommended Trenchard's Complete Vocabulary Guide to the Greek New Testament, but we didn't give you any details about how to use it.
There are two sections in Trenchard that will especially help you memorize vocabulary.
Cognate Word Groups
The first is Section One, where words are organized by their cognates. For example, the famous noun ἀγάπη ("love") is related to a verb, ἀγαπάω ("I love") and to an adjective, ἀγάπητος, η, ον ("beloved"). Memorizing these three together gives you three words for the price of one, as it were, since their meanings are similar.
The words are arranged alphabetically in groups, so you can easily look up a word to find its cognates. For example, if you look up διδάσκω ("I teach"), you'll find 10 cognates, including διδασκαλία ("teaching"), used 21 times, and διδάσκαλος ("teacher"), used 59 times.
Frequency List of Words
Section Two is a frequency list of words, arranged in groups of 10, from the most frequently used to the least. The first group begins with the definite article ὁ, ἡ, τό, used 19,867 times, and ends with 230 words used only one time.
A good way to use this section is to start at the beginning and check off words you know and then focus on the words you don’t know, working your way down to as few occurrences as you choose. If you're serious about reading competency, an ambitious yet reachable goal would be memorizing up to 10 occurrences or more, which totals 1,000 words. That will greatly increase your fluency in reading the NT.
