800 Words and Images: A New Testament Greek Vocabulary Builder (AGROS)

This is another helpful resource from GlossaHouse. It is basically a pictorial dictionary of 800 words in Koine (New Testament) Greek. While the artwork is pretty rudimentary, and sometimes humorous, it is a great way to learn vocabulary visually. The 800 words are arranged in sections, such as "Animals," "The Body," "Family," etc. Each word entry also includes synonyms. So, for the word πατρία (family), they also list συγγένεια (kinship, relatives). It also includes a comprehensive alphabetical vocabulary list in the back, giving the English meanings of all of the 800 Greek words. This resource will help anyone who is studying NT Greek, and especially those who are primarily visual learners.

Michael Holcomb has created a helpful guide for learning Koine Greek nouns by conjoining images and vocabulary for associated memorization The images have guides so they can easily be cut out and put into flash cards. The images, themselves, generalized, broad-brushed and lacking detail, are essentially uninteresting, making them less effective than they would be if more effort had been put into it.. If there is any confusion about an image, a glossary at the back gives all the words and the single meaning denoted in that image. I personally dislike the kappas in this font but it is a commonly used font. The 800 words are nouns. and learning them is essential to reading Greek text. I would encourage Mr. Holcomb to consider a further publication for prepositions, verbs, participles, synonyms, and antonyms. These are much more difficult to visualize, of course, which makes them a bane to learning Koine Greek. However, considerably more thought and effort needs to be put into the images to transfer meanings and aid in recall..

although the words included are generally ok, the pictures chosen to illustrate them are often unclear as to what the word exactly means, so you may need to look in the back of the book where there is a complete word list with translations.The pictures are all colored cartoonish images, not photos. There are 9 images and words laid out in a grid per page, so there is a large waste of spaceSome pictures are unnecessarily complicated and they have to add a little red arrow pointing to the element of the picture that relates to the word.The pictures are (as stated in the introduction) often anachronistic. Almost all the words are nouns, usually concrete objects. There are some adjectives and numbers Most are very common objects but many of them occur very rarely in the New Testament.- many occur only once or twice.There is no attempt to use the words in sentences, or provide examples of their use in the Bible, There are no exercises.Anyone could produce a similar book for themself from any of the commonly available word lists, and drawing their own images or clipping them out of magazines.

I use this with my 6 and 8-year-old in teaching Greek. We take it a chapter at a time. My kids enjoy the pictures. They especially enjoy the animals!

This is an excellent resource for someone learning New Testament Greek. There are plenty of tools out there for learning Greek vocabulary, e.g. flashcards, Metzger's "Lexical Aids", and so on. But traditionally these have all been based upon written lists of English translation equivalents, which requires a student to take an additional "mental step" when trying to recall a word. Halcomb's book presents Greek vocabulary by image and thereby enables a student to learn a Greek word more directly "on its own terms" and not via an English gloss. Ultimately this is a much more successful way to learn and retain vocabulary. I will be adopting this as a required textbook for an upcoming Greek class I'll be teaching.

Nothing of this kind of resource currently exists in print. This is truly one of a kind. Perhaps the only thing comparable is Story's beginning Greek textbook which uses lots of images as mnemonic devices. But 800 Words and Images focuses on vocabulary. Another volume or revised edition should address verbs, which can be also represented by images.