Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

I once had the opposite experience. When I was doing my first degree I was
told that learning Latin would help me learn the modern Romance languages. I
started doing Latin as an extra module in addition to Hebrew and Greek but
soon realised that wasn't going anywhere fast. I did 2 semesters of Italian
grammar but that wasn't really getting me anywhere either.  An Italian
 friend told me the best way to learn Italian was to go to Italy. I went and
within a month I could understand just about anything and converse fairly
freely. A few years later I went to Tenerife for a couple of weeks and
noticed that Italian and Spanish were so similar that we could usually
understand each other. By the end of the two weeks I'd spotted the major
differences and was able to converse OK.

Personally, for language learning full immersion is the fastest and most
effective method. The problem with Hebrew is that there is no environment
you can immerse yourself in. The nearest we have to immersion is either
reading the Tanakh repeatedly in the hope of developing an instinct or
immersing yourself in Modern Hebrew in the hope the instincts you acquire
have sufficient overlap with the ones you should be acquiring. In principal
Randall's audio visual courses sound like a good idea. That's probably
something I would try if I was to attempt to build an immersive Hebrew
course.

An interesting project would be to attempt to build a generative grammar
induced from the examples we see in the corpus. We may then have an
empirical basis for creating some kind of immersive course.

James Christian

2010/2/7 K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>

> Yitzhak:
>
> On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com
> >wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 8:59 PM,  Dave Washburn wrote:
> > >
> > But let's take the analogy.  Do you know someone who recommends
> > learning Beowulf without
> > knowing Modern English first?
> >
> > Yitzhak Sapir
> >
> > If the only reason a person learned English is to read Beowulf, then
> learning modern English would be of no help, except to access scholarly
> studies written in modern English concerning Beowulf.
>
> The only reason I learned Hebrew is to read Tanakh, which I have read over
> twenty times cover to cover. I have yet to learn any modern Hebrew beyond a
> few basic facts.
>
> There are many people like me who learned Biblical Hebrew for the sole
> purpose of reading Tanakh, but how many learn English for the sole purpose
> of reading Beowulf?
>
> Karl W. Randolph.
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