Saturday, March 14, 2015

Best passages to read after 1st year Greek

Once someone has completed a first-year Greek class, what are the easiest New Testament passages to read?

Let's assume this student is comfortable with vocabulary that occurs 50 or more times in the New Testament.  This is fairly representative of many beginning Greek grammars.  By 'comfortable', I mean they know the basic meaning of the word, and can recognize the various forms it can occur as.

Good reading comprehension requires very few words being unknown.  Literacy research suggests that if less than 95% of words in a passage are unknown, then reading comprehension is hindered.

Using the twin criteria of 1) word frequency and 2) percentage of words in the text that are known, the GNT provides 25 nice-sized passages to work with.


Text length words
known
%
known

Mt 12:46-50 91 89 98%

Mt 18:1-5 78 74 95%

Mt 21:23-27 116 109 94%

Mt 22:41-46 78 74 95%

Lk 8:19-21 54 51 94%

Lk 22:66-71 94 89 95%

Jn 1:10-13 58 57 98%

Jn 2:23-25 55 52 95%

Jn 5:39-47 126 120 95%

Jn 6:35-51 314 302 96%

Jn 6:60-65 113 107 95%

Jn 8:21-30 185 177 96%

Jn 8:39-52a 271 257 95%

Jn 9:35-41 110 109 99%

Jn 12:44-50 133 129 97%

Jn 13:31-35 87 83 95%

Jn 14:8-17 195 186 95%

Jn 17:1-26 498 473 95%

Jn 18:4-9 86 81 94%

Jn 21:20-23 90 86 96%

Gal 1:1-5 75 72 96%

1Jn 3:18-4:6 262 248 95%

1Jn 4:7-16a 182 172 95%

1Jn 5:1-17 350 333 95%

2Jn 1:1-3 59 56 95%

This list could probably be improved if some measure of syntactic complexity were also factored in, but this should at least be a good place to start.

These passages were obtained by searching MorphGNT and the GBI syntax trees, using the SBLGNT text.