1. What is the value of learning to hear a dead language?

Eugene Nida explains the importance of listening for learning anguages: Learning by Listening. My experience learning Spanish well enough to become a bilingual and secondary Spanish teacher convinced me of the value of learning to hear, speak, and write a foreign language to really master it. Learning to hear any language, including a dead one, will help one to think in the language for better understanding. I will be publish my own recordings of all the exercises in Machen's Grammar. For more practice listening, I highly recommend the Erasmian recordings by Dr. Louis Tyler of the books of the New Testament. He has recorded the entire New Testament and is currently well along recording the Greek in the LXX Greek Old Testament. 

2. It is necessary to do the English to Greek Exercises in Machen's New Testament Greek for Beginners? 

It is not necessary to do the English to Greek exercises to gain a working knowledge of NT Greek. Donald Wise skipped the English to Greek exercises in Summer's Essentials in his Moody Bible Institute course that I took in 1972. Most of the recent NT Greek Grammars do not even include English to Greek exercises. John D. Schwandt's An Introduction to Biblical Greek is notible exception. Merkle and Plummer's Beginning with NT Greek includes some English to Greek exercises, but does not require accents. 

      On the other hand, I concur with James Hope Moulton in his A First Reader of New Testament Greek  when he wrote, "I
      have supplied extensive exercises in turning English into Greek, believing that a really thorough knowledge of the grammar is
      best secured this way." 

      This approach will be especially beneficial for people who have experience reading Greek and would like to deepen their grasp of the language by learning to compose Greek.