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? 

 I did learn to read Greek without writing any when I took first college course in greek in 1972 with Donald Wise who skipped the English to Greek exercises in Summer's Essentials in his Moody Bible Institute course. 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. Schwandt's approach is an updated version of H. V. P Nunn's Elements of NT Greek.  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."  I believe that students who master the English to Greek exercises in Machen's
      gammar will read with greater fluency and comprehension than those who skip those exercises. A little more effort at
      the outset will lead to far greater results down the road.  

      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.