After a year or two of elementary Greek grammar the best thing a student can do is read, read, read. Turn off all parsing aids and close all interlinears. With a text and a print dictionary in hand, read, read, read. Read the Greek NT, the LXX, the Apostolic Fathers, Josephus, Epictetus, Aesop, Herodotus, and Homer. Much is learned through exposure. Of course, composition (English to Greek), too often neglected, is a key ingredient in gaining a degree of mastery. A time-tested complement to these exercises is simple vocabulary drilling, especially in the earliest stages, and for readers of the Greek NT helps like Bruce Metzger's Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek have been standard. It is only good sense to learn vocabulary beginning with the most frequently occurring words and proceeding in descending levels to the less frequently occurring words — all the while reading.

What is given herein is no substitute for these exercises but a further complement only. Anyone who has spent time struggling to make their way through the texts of the NT sooner or later observes that knowing all the lexical (1/s present indicative) forms in the world is of limited use if the verb has an irregular stem. What good is it to know that [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is glossed I run if what one actually sees while reading is [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].

A further observation underscores this point. The verb [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] occurs only 3x in the NT. Its most common compound form, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], occurs 24x. Because the separate forms occur so infrequently, many students may learn none of them in their course of study; and if they dip low enough into a list of lexical forms to reach [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], they will learn only the lexical stem. The form of this verb most often encountered is the 3rd principal part (PP), [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]]. Since that is what the students will see, they will be stumped. It is an irregular PP of a verb they may never have learned. Taken together,however, all the forms of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (simple form plus all the compound forms built on it) occur 62x, and the 3rd PP alone occurs 40x. By the standards of most first-year courses, a word that occurs that often ought to have been learned as part of the basic introduction to Greek!

It is imperative, therefore, that while students read and memorize lexical stems, they must also be drilling on the most commonly occurring irregular stems.

Of course, any good first-year NT Greek primer lays a foundation of vocabulary and lists the PPs of most of its verbs. In all vocabulary acquisition, however, regular cycles of review are essential. The present list collects all the stems that will have been studied in the first semesters of work, sifts out the least frequent, adds others, and arranges them from more to less common. For instance, in the first year of study one learns [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (I bear, carry) and its different PP stems including the 2nd and 3rd. Now, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] occurs 192x in all of its forms (simplex + compounds). But of all those, it occurs only 3x as 2nd PP [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] occurs 81x in all its forms; its 2nd PP, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], occurs 4x. [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] occurs 177x in all its forms; its 2nd PP, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], occurs 5x. There are good pedagogical reasons to utilize the various stems to illustrate the principle of learning PPs for first-year students, but beyond that, for functional purposes, it does not make sense to spend one's time learning a form that occurs only 3–5x in the NT before learning other stems (such as the 3rd PP of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) that occur far more often. It would make no more sense to do that than it would to prioritize lexical stems that occur only a handful of times over far more common lexemes.

On the principle that irregular or difficult PP stems are to be learned as separate vocabulary items, and on the principle that it is logical to list stems from most frequently to least frequently occurring, a complement to the standard lexical stem lists is much needed. That is the intention of this resource.

The goal is that, as students read, say, Matthew 5:29, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], they will more readily identify [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as the 3rd PP of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]).

Rather than treating these hard cases as left-overs after all the grammar and vocabulary have been learned, we will place them front and center as a relatively short list that can be mastered with ease. Once a NT text like Matthew 5:29 has been read, there are further challenges for understanding and life. But it must be read.