Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

James:

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 5:51 AM, James Christian
<jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>wrote:

>
> Personally, for language learning full immersion is the fastest and most
> effective method.
>

Agreed.


>  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
>

This is the path I took. Add to that, memorize passages.


> or immersing yourself in Modern Hebrew in the hope the instincts you
> acquire have sufficient overlap with the ones you should be acquiring.
>

This is where I see problems developing.

If one lives in a modern Hebrew environment and accesses Biblical Hebrew
only a few hours a week, he will instinctively read Biblical Hebrew using
modern Hebrew concepts. I’ve spoken to Israelis who are not linguists but
here for conventions (there’s another one this next week), asking them about
reading Tanakh, and invariably they have told me that they find it difficult
to near impossible to understand. Oh yeah, they have no problem reading some
of the simpler parts, but when they get to Isaiah, Jeremiah and some of the
other prophets …


> 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.
>

I think the closest we can to get to an immersion course is to start reading
in Tanakh as soon as possible. Possibly as early as the third week of class,
or earlier. Then intersperse all the whys (grammar) as we are reading along.

>
> James Christian
>
> Karl W. Randolph.