Biblical Hebrew Forum

["biblical hebrew" <jcr.bhebrew AT gmail.com>]

Hi Karl,

sorry about the long wait for a reply. Problems with the Uni email system.

KWR: Here's where I disagree, because these functional rules are not found
in Western languages, a person learning Hebrew would not know to look
for them unless taught to.

JCR: If the goal is to understand the text why does a
student need to look for rules? Different words are
generally translated differently regardless of what the
source language is. Why is it not enough to teach that
'no' and 'know' or 'see' and 'sea' have completely
different meaning although they are pronounced the
same? In what way does not understanding a formalised
version of the underlying grammar inhibit the student's
ability to apply that knowledge? Or take, for example,
'son' (our star) and 'son' (male offspring). How does
knowledge that they are both singular nouns in a
language which treats all nouns as genderless help the
student to distinguish which meaning was meant? Surely
context is much more useful guide.

KWR: By not explicitly teaching them, are you
expecting students to learn these functions through osmosis?

JCR: That would be the natural way of learning but as
you rightly observe there are a number of aspects of
learning a dead language which make immersive learning
problematic to simulate. More on this later.

KWR: But how would students know which pronunciation to choose, unless they
have been taught that these different pronunciations exist and the
functional differences that the different pronunciations make?

JCR: I'm not saying don't teach the various
pronunciations. I'm saying teach the various
pronunciations as different words with different
meaning. Enough examples which display a similar
pronunciation pattern will stimulate an interest in the
student as to what is going on here. This is the moment
that a formal presentation of grammar is most likely to
result in learning. Students who are content to accept
the difference in meaning but would only be confused
by grammatical terminology should be given the
opportunity to continue learning in a semantically
oriented way until such a time that they express an
interest in understanding formalisations of grammatical
structures.

In any case, as with any unique spelling that can have
various meanings (son versus son) it is context and
common sense that helps the reader to make the decision
and not an understanding of conventional grammatical
formalisations.

KWR: I don't know about that. Biblical Hebrew seems to have had very few
complex lexemes, where two or more words work together to give a third
meaning.

JCR: But we are not just talking about single words. We
are talking about unique combinations of consonants
which can have more than one vocalisation.

Also, please don't underestimate the value of providing
the student with high frequency examples of natural
language. Not only are you empowering the student to
immediately recognise large portions of the Hebrew text
but you are stimulating their natural language learning
mechanisms.

KWR: Unfortunately, once a person already has certain ideas as to how
languages operate because of his familiarity with his own language,
any second language that he learns he will be comparing it with his
primary language. "If I want to express the function of going in
language  X  , how would I do it?"

JCR: Well, let's take Ukrainian for example. You can't
talk about 'going' in general as you can in English.
You have to make the distinction between going on foot
- 'ite' and going by some form of transport - 'yichate'

Translating is very little use because a 1:1
translation does not exist. But by exploiting the
cognitive mechanisms of the human mind you can explain
the difference between the two Ukrainian words and give
the student a direct understanding of these two words.
Only with this level of cognitive understanding will
a reader of Ukrainian texts be able to appreciate that
the Ukrainian approximations of English 'go'
communicate more than the English generalisation which
does not exist in Ukrainian.

I have often had the experience where students ask me
'How do you say ... in English?' and I have had to
think long and hard to generate a translation as my
understanding of what they are saying is cognitively
based and not translation based. While this is a bad
quality for a translator, it speeds up understanding
the target language no end.

KWR: Pictures help, but when we deal with adults, how useful?

JCR: It all depends on the person really. They say
that everything you have ever seen and heard is stored
in your brain somewhere. The problem is in successfully
stimulating the recall. Some people have very visually
oriented memories. I know people who remember where
a particular verse in the bible is by its location on
the page rather than its verse number. They are stuffed
when they get a new bible with a different layout but
it just goes to show that different brains respond to
different stimuli.

One of the massive advantages of using pictures is
their language portability. Imagine vocabulary games
which show an image of an item and the student has to
choose the correct hebrew consonant combination. Such a
game would be immediately accessible to people of all
nations (not only English speakers are interested in
reading the bible) and be visually more stimulating
than a similar game which uses an English translation
in place of the image.

KWR: The problem we are dealing here with is written, not spoken, language.
Sometimes the rules of learning are different.

JCR: Agreed! But there are great similarities between
listening skills and reading skills. The major
difference being that in reading exercises the reader
doesn't have to keep asking the speaker to speak slower
or repeat themselves.

KWR: In Western languages which were/sometimes still are phonetically
written, the progression is letter -> syllable -> word -> sentence. In
languages which were written with syllabaries, then the progression of
learning to read is syllable -> word -> sentence.

JCR: This is true. But we are talking about teaching
to read without vowels. A knowledge of the consonants
and the various syllabic pronunciations they can have
is therefore paramount.

Anyway, as long as they have a way of producing silent
sounds in their brain as they read the text I don't
suppose phonetic training is as important as it would
be in a scenario where they would need to be able to
listen to and recognise forein sounds so I won't make
a massive stand on this.

In terms of learning games I was thinking along the
lines of something like the following. You know those
games where you have to turn two cards over and get a
matching pair? I think a game like that could be a fun
introduction to the symbols.

A variation of the game for learning the sounds could
be to have to match a symbol with its sound (or a
syllable which begins with its sound). We could have
one set of cards to turn over on the left side of a web
page which have Hebrew letters on the reverse and one
set of cards on the right side of the web page which
cause a .wmv file to be played when turned over.

These games might seem a little ... to you but the
angle my teacher training has taught me to come from is
from the learner learning rather than the teacher
teaching. In such a model the teacher is merely an aid
to learning rather than a miracle worker who can
transplant permanent knowledge into a student's brain
merely by explaining things (if only all students had
such wonderful memories).

KWR: As for Biblical Hebrew, we don't know and we may never know how it was
pronounced, nor the exact correlation between writing and spelling.
All we can do is muddle through. But by teaching the grammaticalized
functions and their possible spellings (reading Biblical Hebrew is
more difficult because of the fluid spelling), do we not at least give
students basic rules that will help them learn?

JCR: See below.

KWR: If I were
a student, I would be very, very frustrated!

JCR: I suppose one of the things we both need to bear
in mind is that we both have different ways of learning
and that our views on an 'ideal course' are largely
influenced by our own experience of what helps us to
learn best.

Just as we have different ways of learning prospective
students have a whole array of different preferred
learning methods and an 'ideal course' would be
something which caters for all learner types.

At the two extremes you've got your grammar addict and
you've got your grammarphobes. In between those two
extremes is a whole spectrum of different learners.

The great advantage of online courses or software
courses is that they can be designed in such a way that
there is no need to work through a course 'page by
page' as is traditionally done with printed materials.

A digital course can be designed with various pathways
to learning and the user can be given control over the
selecting the pathway which best fits. For the sake of
a concrete example let's consider what I was suggesting
about teaching different grammatical forms as if they
were different words. A lesson so oriented could have a
'grammar link' which takes the learner to the page
which describes the underlying grammar and another
link which takes the learner to more vocabulary or
natural frequent n-grams which contain this word. The
learner is therefore empowered to take charge of their
own learning and not forced to sit through grammar
presentations they have not been sufficiently
stimulated enough to appreciate and therefore learn.

Coming back to the point of hand holding consider this.
There are students who want to be hand held so that
they can gain confidence in reading the text before
having to work forms out for themselves and there are
learners who would rather be thrown in at the deep end
so that they are forced to learn these forms early on.
The former would be discouraged by an insistence of no
hand holding and would be likely to soon give up trying
to learn to read Hebrew. So, I suppose what I am
trying to say is that rather than imposing any
particular methodology on all students as if they all
learned in the same way to design things in a way that
makes things accessible to all shapes and sizes of
learners.

Could you imagine Yhwh saying to Granny X of 80 years
old "Sorry but you can't read my words in their
original language because I only design courses for
the grammatically adept"?

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James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew       -  thesis1: concept driven machine
translation using the Aleppo codex
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc  -  thesis2: language acquisition simulation

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