[b-hebrew] Hebrew Textbooks
James Read
J.Read-2 at sms.ed.ac.uk
Wed May 6 18:00:46 EDT 2009
At St. Andrews in Scotland the Hebrew 101 module is based around the
davidson text (for obvious reasons, it was designed and published by
one of their lecturers).
The text does have some doctored Hebrew readings but is largely based
around the kind of grammatical approach to teaching languages that was
popularised by the schools of Latin in the middle ages. This basically
means that the book makes you learn conjugations the most part of
which are not actually attested in extant biblical Hebrew and don't
particularly help you attain a vocabulary level sufficient to start
reading any real Hebrew from the Tanakh.
I have, once, seen a very thin paged book which was centred around a
vocabulary building method of teaching where words were learned in
association with pictures and grammar, if at all presented, is only
done so in a passive way. Unfortunately, I can't remember either the
name or the author of the book but while it was, in my opinion, a step
in the right direction in terms of methodology it was far too short to
be able to take a student from zero to reading some real Hebrew.
IMHO, it is not necessary to teach entire conjugations to get a
student to start reading Hebrew. Most verbs in the tanakh, for obvious
reasons, are third person (it's a narrative) and a course which
centres on teaching high frequency vocabulary would get someone
reading Hebrew much quicker. Low frequency vocabulary, things like 1st
and 2nd person forms of verbs, are something that it is far more
appropriate to teach when the student requests it (inquiry based
learning). This is the moment that the student actually cares what the
form means, probably already has a theory (from the context they read
it in) and from a psycholinguistic point of view is the moment that
the student is most likely to assimilate that grammar both tacitly and
permanently.
James Christian Read
Quoting George Athas <George.Athas at moore.edu.au>:
> Hi all!
>
> In light of recent posts, I thought I'd put a few questions out there:
>
> (1) Which book did you use when you began to learn Hebrew?
>
> (2) If you are (or have been) an instructor, which book(s) do you
> use in the classroom? Any pro's and con's?
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> GEORGE ATHAS
> Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
> www.moore.edu.au
>
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>
>
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