GREK 101 — Beginning Greek I: Alphabet, Nouns, and Basic Verbs

Beginning Greek I is Cathedra's first language course, built to teach Koine Greek in the only way that actually works: through massive repetition, multimodal engagement, and interleaved practice across every session. The course is not a reading list, a grammar summary, or a vocabulary memorization plan. It is a structured program of exercises — flashcards with spaced retrieval, parsing drills against real New Testament forms, audio recognition using reconstructed Koine pronunciation, and mixed drills that combine all of these — scaffolded by just enough prose to frame what the student is practicing. By the end of the course, the student will recognize and pronounce every letter and diphthong of the Greek alphabet, recognize approximately 250 of the most common New Testament Greek words (covering roughly 80% of the New Testament text), identify the five cases and use them correctly, conjugate the present active, present middle/passive, and imperfect indicative of regular verbs, read and translate simple sentences from the New Testament (particularly the First Letter of John, which uses a limited vocabulary and simple syntax), and parse any form encountered in the course completely and accurately. The course takes roughly 28 hours to complete if the student does every exercise and reviews flashcards as scheduled. The rhythm is steady: 5 to 8 new vocabulary items per lesson, one grammatical concept per module, and daily review sessions that reactivate prior material through the spaced retrieval system. The course presents Koine Greek, the international language of the eastern Roman Empire in the first century — the language in which the entire New Testament was written. Pronunciation follows the reconstructed Koine system (Buth/Kantor school), which recovers the phonology of the first century rather than the sixteenth-century Erasmian convention most seminaries still use.