Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>]

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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