I am teaching a beginning Greek student about parsing nouns and verbs. I have explained to him the basic concepts of tense, voice, mood, person, and number (Greek verbs) and of gender, number, and case (Greek nouns).
While reviewing these with him yesterday, I recovered an approach to helping students learns these concepts that I first came up with a number of years ago. Using many English sentences and explaining how each word works in the English sentence, I then showed him what Greek would use to convey those same functions for the nouns and verbs.
The following example illustrates this approach:
Tim, Joe gave Frank his book.
Tim – direct address = vocative;
Joe – subject = nominative;
Frank – indirect object = dative;
his – (shows possession) = genitive;
book – direct object = accusative
gave – aorist active indicative
Here are 25 sentences that I made up to use this approach. For nouns/pronouns, give the case. For verbs, give the tense, voice, and mood, unless directed otherwise. Skip the underlined words.
Dave sent flowers to his wife.
Flowers were sent to Dave’s wife.
Dave, have you sent her flowers?
Dave has sent his friends Christmas cards.
The old man had bathed himself until he fell and hurt himself yesterday.
Roy was watching TV.
Mike is listening to the news.
Roy is her husband.
Joe had been mistreated by his boss until recently.
His car is being damaged by hail.
Tim had hoped that he would get a good grade in the class until he failed his test.
Will she do her homework on time?
I had lived in sin until God opened my eyes.
Were you being watched?
The picture showed the accident.
The men of Rome were hating themselves.
Have their children been saved?
The policemen should be arriving home soon. (Present ____________ _______________).
The children may be taught by the new teacher. (Aorist ____________ _______________).
Don hit himself with his racket.
You are hearing for yourselves how bad things really are now.
I will be satisfied when I get to heaven.
Joe has burned himself before.
What should I send mom for her birthday? (Aorist _____________ _____________).
Bill will wash himself.
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