So you say want to learn to read Scripture in the original language? You want to be able to pick up the Greek New Testament and read like you do in English? Do your actions to suggest otherwise? Do your actions indicate that you do not want this skill?

Your daily habits

Learning to read in another language is a time consuming process. Delay your reading skills by not adding daily reading practice into your daily routine. This will guarantee a delay in your goal of learning to comfortably read Biblical Greek as comfortable as you do English. So delay your progress by avoiding daily reading, and daily flashcards. Don’t have a website or app that you can pick up and study when you are waiting in a line. Don’t include reading small ways to read text in your daily reading routine.

Discourage Yourself with Difficult Text

An excellent way to delay your reading skills is to always read text that contains many words you cannot read. This forces you to slow down and look up every second word in a dictionary. This is a great way to get more comfortable with a dictionary than actually reading for pleasure. You must also be sure to avoid reading and re-reading these texts. After expending so much energy reading that difficult text, after looking up 30% of the words in a dictionary, make sure you don’t return to this text to revise it one hour later. Definitely don’t revise it the next day. The ideal way to discourage yourself is to return to that text one month later. This will guarantee optimal memory loss of that hard work, and generate a good amount of discouragement.

Spend most of your time using Flashcards

We all know flashcards are an important part of the learning process. Someone who wants to delay the skill of reading comfortably should make sure they spend more time in flashcards than they do reading Greek or Hebrew. A good suggestion would be to spend 1 hour throughout the day memorizing words, and don’t spend time reading sentences, stories, and biblical text. If you do spend time reading, remember to find text that is hard to read and therefore slow and discouraging to engage in.

Use an interlinear with English on top of the Greek

Actively working to recall the meaning of a word while you are reading is very important. This must be avoided. Active recall can be interrupted by placing English definitions above every word. The brain would much prefer to naturally and subconsciously drift a few millimeters upwards to see the English gloss instead of expending energy working to recall the meaning of the word. So delay your reading skills by finding books and tools that place the English definition right above the word. Do not don’t use an interlinear that places the English text on a separate page. Do not use a website or app that requires you to tap to see the definition.

Don’t find peers to study with

It is important to delay your reading skills, by not having a reading/study group. You definitely dont want to find people who will encourage and spurs you on. You don’t want to be encouraged by other people to stay on top of your reading plan and practice your reading. At all costs, you must avoid putting yourself in a situation that generates peer pressure to grow and progress your reading skills.

Grow your Social Media Usage

Reading Biblical Greek and Hebrew is hard. It’s much easier to spend time talking about biblical languages than it is to actually practice reading the languages. Spend time debating and arguing about the meaning words scholars cannot define. Spend time reading blog posts that talk about learning Biblical Greek. Debate with strangers online about which technique is best for learning to read Greek and Hebrew. Most importantly, use social media until you are too tired to pick up your Greek or Hebrew text and read it. Scroll through instagram, turn off the light and drift off to sleep for the night.