There's a lot of homework assigned in the workbook for each chapter in the textbook! But it's all worth it. The first part for almost every exercise in the workbook is parsing: declining nouns; parsing verbs. The second is translating selected Greek passages of the Bible into English. After every five chapters or so, there is a review exercise in the workbook testing the material in the chapters just learned.

There is no need to buy an answer key because all the answers to the parsing drills are found in the grammar itself--either in the glossary in the back or in the text of the substantive chapters. For the answers to the translations, any interlinear Greek-English Bible will do or even just an English Bible.

One of the best things about the translation exercises is that they gradually teach you how to do exegesis as you progress through the text. (The second year course--William Mounce's "A Graded Reader of Biblical Greek" and Daniel Wallace's "Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics"--concentrates on exegesis almost exclusively). The copious footnotes give all kinds of interesting theological and etymological tidbits that make translation really fun. This is additional to the sheer joy of being able to translate the Word of God yourself and seeing it in "color" through the Greek text instead of in "black and white" in an English translation.

Both the grammar and workbook are very user-friendly. It is almost as if Prof. Mounce is sitting next to you encouraging and, if necessary, cracking the whip over you. The workbook is a necessary complement to the grammar. I almost did not buy the workbook but am very glad that I did. William Mounce makes learning Greek possible without even having to set foot in a seminary class.

There's a lot of homework assigned in the workbook for each chapter in the textbook! But it's all worth it. The first part for almost every exercise in the workbook is parsing: declining nouns; parsing verbs. The second is translating selected Greek passages of the Bible into English. After every five chapters or so, there is a review exercise in the workbook testing the material in the chapters just learned.

There is no need to buy an answer key because all the answers to the parsing drills are found in the grammar itself--either in the glossary in the back or in the text of the substantive chapters. For the answers to the translations, any interlinear Greek-English Bible will do or even just an English Bible.

One of the best things about the translation exercises is that they gradually teach you how to do exegesis as you progress through the text. (The second year course--William Mounce's "Graded Reader of Biblical Greek" and Daniel Wallace's "Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics"--concentrates on exegesis almost exclusively). The copious footnotes give all kinds of interesting theological and etymological tidbits that make translation really fun. This is additional to the sheer joy of being able to translate the Word of God yourself and seeing it in "color" through the Greek text instead of in "black and white" in an English translation.

Both the grammar and workbook are very user-friendly. It is almost as if Prof. Mounce is sitting next to you encouraging and, if necessary, cracking the whip over you. The workbook is a necessary complement to the grammar. I almost did not buy the workbook but am very glad that I did. William Mounce makes learning Greek possible without even having to set foot in a seminary class.

Thus, the workbook consists primarily of readings - and all from the New Testament. Unlike some grammars, Mounce gives you the NT text right from the beginning. Unfamiliar words are glossed in the text. While this is a little jarring at first, my advice is to get used to it. Even after you graduate from learning Greek (or any language) and move on to "real" readings, you'll come upon lots of unfamiliar words. Even then, it'll be a process to stop reading, look up the word, and figure out how it fits in the sentence. I'm not an expert in Greek, but know Latin reasonably well, and I can tell you that very often I'll have to do this same thing reading "real" Latin texts.

So, I think Mounce's method is to get you used to doing this process right from the beginning. I believe this is a good idea - sometimes I wish my Latin learning had used this method.