Tips

Which books to tackle first

I think it is fun to finish something, so I started with short books. In the NT, 1, 2 or 3 John are very nice. After that, the gospel of John is pretty quick. This gives you a great start: once you’ve finished those two books, about a third of the words in any of the gospels will already have glosses. If you move on to Mark next, more than half of the words in the New Testament will have glosses.

In the OT, Ruth and Jonah are good ones to start with.

Workflow

I keep two windows open. The first is the Open Reader’s Bibles website itself. The second has 1) a literal translation in the target language, 2) the original Greek or Hebrew.

It’s nice to have a target translation available, because you can copy/paste names and things like that.

It’s nice to have the original language, because you can search. (E.g., “I just now realized there’s a better gloss for this word, but I think it came up once before. Where was that?”)

Consistency

It’s good to decide on some glossing practices beforehand. Here are some ideas.

• Nouns will always be singular.
• Verbs will always be in the infinitive form.
• Verbs will always be glossed in their active form. (Or alternately, verbs with be glossed with an active or passive form, depending on context.)

Non-obvious tricks

• Double-click on a source language word for an English gloss and full parsing.