Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryan Rocine" <brocine AT earthlink.net>]

Hi Randy,

I'm enjoying the exchange, and hope you are as well.  Your passion comes
through, and I hope mine does, too!   ;-)

you wrote:

> Bryan wrote:
> > I think that the best way to go at a goal is by the direct route. If the
> > goal is to read the Tanakh in Hebrew, start reading the Tanakh rather
> than
> > conversing in BH. Start with the things one encounters most. Move
towards
> > what one encounters the least.
>
Randall wrote:
> is that the best way to learn to read goethe? or shakespeare

Are you sure you want to make this analogy?  All but the most gifted and
hard-working ESL students are years away from being able to stumble their
way through a single page of Shakespeare if they start their education in
Eng from scratch, even though they may be immersed in an Eng-speaking
environment.  Of course this goes especially for us poor adults.  The kids
are so much faster to learn! (I like the suggestion heard lately of teaching
BH and B-Greek to kids...right on!)

Shakespeare and the Tanakh are not alike in size and quality of lexicon,
over-all structure, context, genre.  These distinctions make learning Sh.
Eng. a very different task.

Besides which, we're going to have to do some radical and imaginative
transformations to the world if we want to make learning to read Sh
analogous to learning to read the Tanakh in BH.  English cannot be the
lingua franca.   Sh. English has to sit as a virtual linguistic island
without reams of literary and linguistic artifact before and after it.  And
are we also willing to imagine that this imaginary student of Sh. English
only wants to read Sh. in "the original" and has no real world need to
produce Sh. English?   Then the pedagogy suitable for teaching how to read
Sh is inching closer to how I propose to teach reading the Tanakh...

However, having to choose between learning to read the Tanakh in BH and
Shakespeare in Eng, and all things being equal, I think we would find
learning to read the Tanakh much easier.  To go from scratch in Eng to
reading Shakespeare may indeed too big a leap to attempt at one shot by
simply reading the text.  Fortunately for the student of BH, the Tanakh is
somewhat limited in the scope of semantic domains it attests, and it is
largely repetitive in topic, theme, idiom, formula, and syntax.  These
qualities of the Tanakh make it a suitable language to learn by actually
reading strategically chosen texts, moving from the more frequently attested
language to the less so.

Shalom,
Bryan

B. M. Rocine
Associate Pastor
Living Word Church
6101 Court St. Rd.
Syracuse, NY 13206

(office) 315.437.6744
(home) 315.479.8267