If I were going to learn conversational Spanish or Italian or Greek (modern) one of the first things I would do would be to pick up a few exercise books on basic language use. Basic questions and answers, everyday idioms, etc. I've often wished that one could find such an exercise book for Koine. In teaching sessions, it would be so helpful to have sample exercises for a study of a chapter of the GNT. It would include simple questions and sample answers which one could then take and apply to other chapters of the NT. And it would include ideas for further dialogue, with examples of the Greek that would be used.
Maybe there are such exercise books around, and if you know of any please, please let me know! I know that there have been lots of good individual efforts such as Jonathan Robie's work awhile back on the B-Greek site showing how to structure Greek questions , and videos+ from Paul Nitz, and so on. But it sure would be nice to have a sort of complete intro Koine Greek dialogue guide focused on how to approach a GNT book study using conversational Koine.
Such a thing would be extremely valuable for improving Koine Greek Literacy. I expect it would be a huge success (amongst people interested in this type of thing.) We need more things that talk about koine greek using simple koine greek.
"Build it and they will come!" :)
Oh, man! I'd mortgage the house to purchase that series! OK, well I don't have a house, but I would sure like to have such a tool. I have developed a few questions here and there over the years and some dialogue examples, but it is slow, and I'm not always confident of correct usage, especially if I wander too far from GNT examples.
I have actually been thinking about the same thing. I started doing these verse-of-the-day in Koine Greek Q & A posts on the KoineGreek.com Twitter and it got me thinking to do something a bit more comprehensive.
I came up with the following idea (as something to do potentially down the road):
What do you think about a commentary series that takes a book of the Bible in Greek and just has simple (and ranging to more complex) questions on every verse of the text in Koine Greek. In this way, you could use it as a self-study guide that helps you think through the book in Greek and you could also use it to teach the text. Each verse would begin with simple questions and gradually progress to more complex questions so that real exegetical questions could actually be addressed in Greek.
What do you think? If there is enough interest, maybe I'll do something like this for a short book to start and see.