Thought it would be a good time to update you on how college is going after almost two weeks of Greek intensive.

Greek has been a hard slog, exciting, but still hard. Early this week I couldn’t help but think that it was all a bit beyond me. Learning verbs, as well as all the other vocab we have learnt was maxing out my brains ability to store new information. Then yesterday everything clicked, almost.

I’m a practical kind of person, which means that I work best when I’m actually doing what I am learning. Which is what we started doing yesterday. Yesterday we started doing some translations of whole sentences, from scratch. It was such a relief to be able to see where different words fitted in to the sentence. It was also nice to see that all the formulas that I had been working on perfecting was actually leading to something more tangible. Remembering most of the vocab was nice too.

So we have one more day of intensive to go, no doubt we will learn more tomorrow. So Greek is proving to be the challenge I thought it would be, but it is also more enjoyable than I thought it would be too.

Didn’t get to post last night. Kirsty and I have our date night on Thursday nights, it’s something we both really look forward to. It also means that I try and remain free of digital stuff, facebook, twitter and website. If you are married, even if you have children, we would highly recommend it.

Yesterday I learnt the importance of learning vocab, translating from Greek is going to be easier if I can learn specific words, how to pronounce them and what an equivalent English word might be.

I’ve been trying to learn all this vocab by using an awesome iPhone app called ivocabulary. Basically you load in all the words that you want to learn. (we have a list of words we have to learn each day) ivocabulary is great, in each session it gives you a slideshow of words and their English equivalents and then tests you on all the words, while telling you if you are wrong or right.

So my vocab is going really well, thanks to my iPhone. On Wednesday night I even dreamt in Greek… Not sure if that is a good thing.

Today we learnt some of the important things you should do when you are translating Greek to English. Firstly its generally a good principal to get the word you are translating right in the first place. Translating the greek word Jesus into the english word desert would be an example of breaking the first rule.

Along with many other things you should do, getting the words translated in the correct order is one that stuck in my head. English has many rules that govern what words can go together to form a sentence. For example, the words (ran the ball after dog the) don’t really mean much when placed randomly together. English has rules that mean that those six words can be constructed into the sentence “The dog ran after the ball” or of you are Yoda “After the ball the dog ran” is possible.

Translating into Greek is challenging because the rules that govern Greek are not the same as the ones which govern English, meaning that sentences can seem pretty random.

Anyway, all that was just so I could introduce you to a few mis-translations that we were given today. Enjoy!

Today myself and the whole 1st year group at Moore College year kicked off what will be 2 weeks of intensively learning Koiné Greek.

I had a mixture of both excitement and trepidation going into today. Learning a new language is something that I have never really done before. My language experience so far had amounted to a lady from Italy I worked with once who taught me how to swear in Italian, not the best preparation for learning at a bible college.

However the day was great. Today we focussed on the alphabet, sounds, and a couple of commonly found words in Mark’s gospel. I had done some work on my Greek in the last few weeks which made life easier. All my new classmates were helping each other out with problems, which was great!

It is exciting to see the beginnings of the ability to read the New Testament in the language it was written. At this stage I still feel a bit like a little kid trying to learn english for the first time. Sometimes the word comes out perfectly, other times I might as well be speaking… well Greek.

Koiné Greek is a great language, It was what Greek’s spoke on the street, it had street cred (not in a Jenny from the block kind of way). It was perfect for evangelism because most people in the known world knew how to read and speak it, meaning language barriers that we might have now were not as present.

Now to do my homework… And prepare to learn more tomorrow.