Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi,

yeah. If you really wanna do the whole shebang then I would agree largely
with Randall. Go for modern Hebrew first. I would suggest learning it first
as a spoken language in a full immersion environment. Get used to reading
the newspaper in consonant text and that kind of thing. When you are
comfortable with that then you will be a good position to start reading
older varieties of Hebrew. As Randall said this will be good for deep
internalisation because you are communicating in Hebrew all the time. This
will be good when you meet similarities but might be disadvantageous when
their are differences in semantic meaning of terms as used presently and as
they were once used. This is the kind of problem that exists with the
relationship between modern Greek and koine Greek. I don't know about modern
Hebrew because I don't speak it yet but I assume that a similar problem will
exist.

I suppose a lot depends on the way you learn and your motives for learning.
So why don't you tell us a little about yourself? Why do you want to learn
modern Hebrew? As a way of better understanding the older varieties or for
communicative goals? What language acquisition experiences do you have? How
do you normally learn a language? What usually works best for you?

Ultimately, in my opinion, the best and most natural way to learn a language
is by full immersion. But, unfortunately, some people are just so far
removed from their childhood that they have lost touch with the neural
mechanisms that make this easy for those who appear to be gifted but in
reality are just using the exact same neural pathways that *everybody* used
to learn their first language.

James Christian

2009/10/14 Joseph Justiss <jljustiss AT msn.com>

>
> What course of action do you all recommend for a student who wants to learn
> the post biblical forms of Hebrew? Should I begin with Mishnaic then
> Medieval then Modern? If so what are the best resources and approaches for
> learning each one of these in your opinions? I appreciate your help.
>
>
>
> Joe Justiss
>
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