You now have the whole of the morphology: six principal parts, four moods, three voices, three declensions, and about 800 words. That is enough to read the New Testament with a lexicon beside you, and not enough to read it fluently. This chapter is about the distance between those two.
Nothing here is new grammar. It is what to do with the grammar you have, and what not to do with it.
Read every day, in the easiest thing you can find
The people who keep their Greek are, in my experience, the ones who read it most days and read something easy enough to enjoy. Those two habits do more than any amount of revision.
Start with 1 John — short sentences, small vocabulary, endless repetition. Then Mark, then John, then Acts. Leave Hebrews, Luke's prologue and 2 Peter until much later; they are the hardest Greek in the book and they will convince you that you have learned nothing.
Ten minutes a day beats an hour on Saturday. The Read tab holds twelve graded passages for exactly this, and the reader will parse any word you tap.
Read forward, not sideways
The temptation, when a sentence resists, is to stop and take it apart. Sometimes that is right. Usually it is the thing that kills the habit.
Read to the end of the sentence first. Greek puts its clues everywhere, and the word that unlocks a clause is often three words later. Parsing left to right, one word at a time, is how a reader gets stuck on a participle for ten minutes and then discovers that the article two words on had settled it.
Then go back for what you missed. Two passes at speed teach more than one pass at a crawl.
Observe the aspect
If you take one habit from this course into your reading, take this one. English asks when did it happen. Greek asks how is it being viewed.
On the account this course has followed, the aorist is the unmarked aspect — the default, the background — while the present and imperfect are marked and put the process in the foreground, and the perfect is the most marked of all and puts the resulting state in front of everything. That is a model, and a useful one; it is not a rule that every aorist is backgrounded.
Χριστὸς ἀπέθανεν ὑπὲρ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν κατὰ τὰς γραφάς
Aorist: he did, in fact, die. Then in the next verse ἐγήγερται, perfect: raised, and risen still. That change of aspect is a key part of the argument — Black and Robertson both read the perfect as raised, and still risen — and it is invisible in most English translations.
Observe the voice, and the article
The active is unmarked; the middle and passive both throw weight onto the subject. So a passive can do more than hide the agent: it puts the person affected in front — which, alongside the reverence chapter 15 described, is part of what gives the divine passive its force.
The article is the other place to look, and it is everywhere: 19,769 occurrences, which makes it the commonest word in the New Testament by more than two to one over καί. Its presence points at particular identity; its absence throws the weight onto character or quality — though, as chapter 4 said, an absence is only evidence where the writer could have written it the other way.
ὁ θεός, ἱλάσθητί μοι τῷ ἁμαρτωλῷ
"God, be merciful to me, the sinner." And here is that principle working against a reading you may like: the article on τῷ ἁμαρτωλῷ is real, and it is still the wrong place to lean, because apposition to a pronoun takes the article as a matter of course — Luke uses the same construction of the Pharisees, the lawyers and the rich. A presence is only evidence on the same terms as an absence.
Observe the order
Greek word order is free in the sense that it does not carry grammar, and it is not free at all in the sense that it carries emphasis. A word out of its expected place is usually there for a reason.
The things to notice: what has been pulled to the front of its clause, what has been held back to the end, and whether a modifier has been separated from what it modifies.
This is the observation most likely to be over-read, because word order carries stylistic weight as well as emphatic weight, and the two are not easy to separate. Notice it, then look for confirmation elsewhere in the sentence before you build on it.
The word-study fallacy
Now the fallacies, because a little Greek is genuinely dangerous and this is the commonest way it goes wrong.
A word's history is not its meaning. ἐκκλησία is built from ἐκ and a form meaning "call", and it does not mean "the called-out ones" — it means an assembly, which is what it meant to everyone who read it. English "goodbye" came from "God be with you" and means neither God nor with nor you.
A word does not carry all its meanings at once. σάρξ can mean flesh, body, human nature, or sinful nature. In any given sentence it means one of those, and the sentence chooses which — not the lexicon entry, and not the meaning you would prefer.
And a word is not a concept. Studying every occurrence of ἀγάπη tells you about the word, not about love in the New Testament, most of which is expressed without using it.
What the grammar cannot settle
Worth saying plainly at the end of a grammar course: most interpretive disputes are not grammatical.
Where two readings of a passage are both grammatically possible, the grammar has done its work by telling you that, and the decision belongs to context, to the argument of the book, and to the rest of Scripture. Announcing that "the Greek says" what is really one of two available readings is the fastest way to lose the confidence of anyone who knows better.
The honest form is the useful one: "the Greek allows this, and here is why I think the context settles it that way". That is a stronger argument, not a weaker one, because it is one your hearers can check.
Where to go from here
You will plateau. Everyone does, usually a few months in, when the vocabulary is no longer new and the reading is not yet fluent. It passes, and it passes faster if you keep reading than if you go back to grammar.
Three things worth having beside you. Two lexicons — a reader's lexicon for reading, and a full one for deciding. An intermediate grammar, for the questions this course cannot answer. And a habit: a paragraph a day, in something easy, before you look at any translation.
This app will keep serving you words, forms and sentences for as long as you keep opening it. But it is scaffolding. The point was never to finish the course; it was to be able to open the New Testament in the language it was written in, and understand a little more than you did before.
That, you can now do.