Book Review: Dictionary of English Grammar for Students of Biblical Languages

I love teaching the biblical languages. It is extremely rewarding to help students learn Greek and Hebrew in order to better understand God’s revelation. However, one of the difficulties of being a language teacher is the inability of many students to think and speak grammatically about English.

The Dictionary of English Grammar for Students of Biblical Languages is a helpful little resource (140 pages) which aims to help with this kind of problem.

A couple years ago I remember reading a book on cognitive learning. One of my major takeaways from the book was that students cannot learn well if they are not using the same vocabulary as the teacher. That was very eye opening to me, and I have endeavored to help students use the same words as I from day one of the class so they are on the same page.

That’s what makes this such a great resource! Kyle Greenwood has done an excellent job creating a manageable reference resource for the language student. The resource is organized alphabetically and covers each major topic or vocabulary term that a language student will run across. He also tries to create entries for those concepts which have more than one term to describe them.

Greenwood will typically give examples of the concept in English, Hebrew, AND Greek. I have included images of the topic on Disjunction for an example.

Ideally, if a student doesn’t understand a term heard in class or read in the textbook, he or she has a ready reference at hand to be able to understand what is being referenced.

I have always tried to have my own personal glossary that I use for students, but this is an improvement from my own handouts I use. Thus, I will definitely be requiring this for my beginning language classes. I think the beginning language student will benefit from this greatly.

Thanks to Zondervan Academic for the review copy.