Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Matthew Anstey" <manstey AT portal.ca>]

Dear B-Haverim

I have been reading the recent flurry of discussion on 1 Sam and discourse
analysis lately and have kept wondering about the following: most native
speakers use language with on average, let's guess, 95%+ grammatical
accuracy according to _their_ own understandings. However we all know that
most native speakers cannot describe their language very well. One day, a
linguist comes along and describes _totally_ (in utopia?) the rules of this
language at every level. Next, take two people who want to learn the
language. One is immersed in the culture with no handbooks, and the other
has lessons with the linguist. After three years we all know who will learn
it better. Now I have (among other things) two goals re BH. First I want to
have as good as possible understanding of BH, and second I want to find
methods to teach students (one day) the same. By analogy to my little
example, it seems that I have to be "immersed" as much as possible in the
language, and that this takes precedence over linguistic description.
Linguistic description helps enourmously at certain points, but does it ever
help one "feel" a language? So, some questions:
        1. how can one best be immersed in a dead language?
        2. how can one best teach others in this way?
        3. at what point does one move to linguistic description, particularly
discourse analysis stuff and how?

Now, some thoughts about own questions.
        1. Randy Buth suggested to me that reading large slabs of BH, 
particularly
Torah, was the best way. He also suggested learning modern Hebrew, which I
hope to do later down the track. What do others think? Goldfajn makes the
point that Bible translators of BH seem to fairly well intuitively grasp the
meanings of the text and the discourse features, and translate these
remarkeably well, in many cases without a theoretical knowledge of
text-linguistics.
        2. I learnt Hebrew using (in this order) Lasor, Waltke & O'Connor, 
Seow,
Williams  & Ben Zvi. I have also read Bodine, Nicacci, Hatav, Goldfajn,
articles by van Wolde, van der Merwe, Joosten, Longacre, etc. This is my
fifth year of Hebrew in one form or another, and I am currently studying
with Waltke using Ben Zvi and W&O'C. But I still do not feel that I have
been "immersed" in the language. I am now reading larger slabs and I think
this is helping, but I am interested in what other teachers of BH have found
useful. I saw at SBL Buth's very inductive method and this seems to have
great potential. Randy, will this be available at an affordable (for
students) price one day?
        3. I think the whole problem of linguistic description of BH in a
pedagogical setting is becoming increasingly complex. This is due to lots of
factors. There is so much linguistic sophistication in BH now, that soon BH
students will be taking courses in linguistics. Is this the way ahead? If
discourse analysis offers the "best" description of the real heart of BH (ie
the most _semantically_ fullsome description in that it shows how the text
conveys meaning the best) surely this needs to become standard in teaching
BH. Also, a problem here lies not with those of us devoted to a lifetime of
BH study. If pastors are to be trained to have competency in comprehending
BH texts and then preparing talks on them in usually a 2/3 years of Hebrew,
it seems like we need to "speed up" the language acquisition five-fold and
teach discourse analysis. But how?

One reason I have rethought about all this learning stuff is that three
months ago I began learning German at the Goethe Institut, which has
excellent teachers. In three months I can write letters to people in German,
talk to German students at uni, even belt my way through those cryptic
Hebraisticum emails occasionally. But after 5 years of Hebrew I don't seem
to have this sort of freedom. The way we learn German is so incredibly
different, and also so much fun. There is little homework, I attend for 3
hours a week, and try to do about 15 mins a day on the bus. Furthermore, and
this is what is remarkable, they say that after just 18 months of this sort
of work, students can pass the ZdDF, which is Year 12 German, giving entry
to University.  If after 18 months of learning BH students were sent in a
time suttle to a BH University in 1000BCE could they have near-native
competency?

Now admittedly German is much closer to English than BH, but surely there
must be a way to teach BH more like this. And apparently studies have shown
that you actually store the language in different parts of the brain when
you learn it these two different ways (and this accounts for the great loss
of BH if it is not used regularly). Perhaps someone could verify/clarify
this for us.

Anyway, that's enought from me. I would appreciate your comments on any of
these points.

Matthew Anstey