Beginning Greek students soon learn the meaning of the verb “parse.” Parsing involves spelling out the grammatical information that is encoded in the form of a Greek word. For nouns, parsing involves case, number, and gender. For verbs, it involves tense, voice, mood, person, and number. For participles, it involves tense, voice, person, number, and gender. Sound familiar? If not, then you never studied Greek or you have forgotten a lot of what you learned.
It is interesting that many first year Greek grammars do not stress parsing in their homework exercises. They just ask the student to translate Greek sentences into English. Sooner or later, diligent Greek students figure out that they cannot produce an accurate translation without knowing how to parse the Greek words.
Now, without practice, your parsing skills get rusty and perhaps you grow to rely on Bible software to do all of your parsing. This is really unfortunate, because you become tethered to your Bible software and cannot really read the Greek text with any level of fluency. Many possible insights from the Greek text will become lost to your view this way.
So, to help everyone who wants to learn, improve, retain, or practice parsing biblical Greek, my wife and I developed MasterGreek.com. I will give you some instruction in the use of this free web-based app. Then, you can live and relive the joys of parsing for the rest of your life.
Here is a blog post that I have recently written about how to use MasterGreek.com’s quiz module.
Participle Handout – Guide for Greek Participles: Six questions to ask about any Greek participle
Relative Clause Handout – This handout will help you to find out what a relative clause modifies (if it is adjectival) and to identify a relative clause that stands on its own (a substantival relative clause).