The goal of The Handy Guide to Difficult and Irregular Greek Verbs is to provide a set of vocabulary aids not found in other vocabulary lists. As a student, I sharpened my skills in Metzger's classic Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek, but it unfortunately led me to believe that the present tense is a kind of "default" for Greek verbs (just think all those paradigms of λύω that you learn as a student). That's where The Handy Guide to Difficult and Irregular Greek Verbs comes in. Written from the perspective of such a student, this book brings together all those verbs which have unusual principle parts and are therefore the most difficult to recognize while reading the New Testament.
When teaching New Testament Greek grammar, my trend has been to have students memorize those principal parts of selected irregular verbs in the second semester, and then slowly introduce the remaining ones in translation courses in the third and fourth semester. The obvious pedagogical problem there, though, is that some of those principal parts never really figure into reading the Greek New Testament, so it's really just extra work.
And along comes Laansma & Gauthier. The best thing about their book is the four page list of irregular verbs ordered by frequency in the New Testament. Each block of 10-12 forms are assigned a letter (a-j). The list begins with δόντος (the aorist active participle, masculine genitive singular of δίδωμι). Although δίδωμι itself only appears 415x in the Greek New Testament, compound forms run that number closer to 600x. By learning this form, the student will recognize forms of παραδίδωμι and ἀποδίδωμι, for example.
Then Part 2 is an alphabetical list of verbs with their compound forms. Taking φέρω as an example, they list the six principle parts, printing the most common in bold and indicating which of the lists in part 1 the form appeared. Only the aorist and aorist passive forms are common enough to appear on the lists in part 1, the future active appears online three times and the perfect middle/passive does not appear at all in the Greek New Testament.
I'm glad someone has finally brought such a resource for those of us who regularly struggle to read the Greek New Testament -- particularly those of us who read devotionally, but also for those who read in order to preach each Sunday. If you're a pastor who believes reading the Greek New Testament is a must, this is a must for your library collection. And if you're a student studying New Testament Greek, consider this required reading material.
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I received a free copy of this book from Kregel Publishing in exchange for my honest review here.