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  • From: James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew Textbooks
  • Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 23:00:46 +0100

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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