Drawing From Fluency In A Second Language

My brothers Jacob and Andy are blogging hard about learning the biblical languages. Both of them are writing some excellent stuff! I’ve just been sitting back and enjoying it. I’d make some popcorn and take it in like I’m at the movies…but I had a bad experience with popcorn when I was younger (and don’t really care for it anymore). But back to biblical languages.

Andy wrote something today that I found especially interesting. Permission to jump in, brothers?

Andy writes:

Fluency, I think, is a key component that is missing in the teaching of biblical languages. Most (American) students who learn the biblical languages can only speak their mother tongue (English). They have probably had four years of high school Spanish, which they studied because they had to, and have all but forgotten it. Personally, I’m finding that the process of learning to speak and communicate in German has greatly improved my Greek (I am currently living in Munich, Germany). Learning to speak this language has pointed out rough edges and sloppy areas in my biblical languages; it has created a greater precision in my approach to Greek. I wonder how the process of learning biblical languages would be different if students could draw from fluency in a second language.

I’m certainly not fluent in Spanish. My friend Brian reads this blog—you can ask him 🙂. Or you could check out one of my sermons in Spanish on the Sermon page. Nevertheless, Andy, I second what you’re saying. Learning (and continuing to learn) Spanish has had a significant impact on my understanding of New Testament Greek. In fact, they are mutuamente útil. My studies in Greek help my studies in Spanish, and vice versa.

With Spanish, the parallels are extensive. For example, I only learn the infinitives in Spanish. The infinitive is the lexical form in Spanish, whereas in Greek it’s the first person singular present active indicative. In Spanish, the infinitive is formed by adding the infinitival morpheme to the root (-ar, -er, -ir). Remove that morpheme and you have the root. Then you add the personal endings (-o, -as, -a, -amos, -áis, -an) to form the present tense.

Just like Greek, irregular verbs complicate things. And just like Greek, if you don’t recognize an irregular form, you can end up inventing words that technically could exist but don’t. Over the years, I’ve produced some impressively creative Spanish forms—usually followed by puzzled looks, polite smiles, or gentle corrections that made it clear I had just said something that wasn’t actually a word.

But this is what I’m getting at—building on what both Jacob and Andy have said: you don’t really learn a language until you start doing something with it. That might mean translating, working through exercises, practicing vocabulary, trying to speak, forming sentences from one language to another, reading a newspaper in the target language, or simply blundering your way through conversations.

I learned because I was using the language regularly. Not perfectly—regularly.

So if you’re trying to gain fluency in New Testament Greek, the takeaway isn’t romance or clever motivation hacks—it’s engagement. Languages don’t stick when they remain abstract systems. They stick when they’re used, tested, stretched, and occasionally broken in real-time use. Fluency grows out of interaction, not isolation.