Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

> Tell me if I misread you.

You misread me. I learned Hebrew from reading the text,
over and over and over, psalms, prophets, tora, and histories,
before I ever sat down and read cover to cover
just for cover to cover's sake.   Especially   helpful
was having the morphology of the language
unconsciously impressed deep down inside through
modern Hebrew. All the theoretical stuff was on the side.
And as any language learner knows, you don't learn a
language from linguistics and analytical descriptions.
That comes afterwards. But a specialist needs both.
a. Fluent control of the language, which means BOTH-directions.
(reading is different in a language where the brain can
matrix process and handle the forms back and forth
without conscious processing)
b. And technical training, in order to sift wheat from chaff.

CVCVCVCV turns out to be chaff and not Biblical Hebrew.
We certainly differ there.

One-directional decoding is not really 'thinking in the
language', even if not translating into another language.
Our definitions differ. I did 'French for reading' way back
when, and didn't 'translate' anything, passed highlevel tests,
and then several years later I actually learned French.
It was like starting from zero, even though I knew the
general shape of the roads that would be followed.
Bi-directional thinking definitely does something special,
which is one point that most Second Language Acquisition
theorists have against Stephen Krashen,
rightly so in my view, even though
Krashen has made considerable and far-reaching
contributions to Second Language studies. (Krashen is
one of the leaders in the field and argues that
bidirectionality will develop out of unidirectional input, which
would normally work out in the natural world. It's a
theoretical point that does not relate to 'never developing
bidirectionality'.)

On challenging a status quo,
from the hard sciences: Newton is still correct within the
proper framework, just like the the MT brings a marvelous set
of data for testing and confirmation. Bohr and Einstein
have an unresolved debate and people are welcome to
join in. But before they can be taken seriously they need
to understand Newton, Calculus, and Schroedinger. That's
what schools are for. New generations are trained, which
leads to making advances and changes, even if most work
only within a status quo.

For language learning,
and that is what is most important
in this whole thread in my view,

students are highly advised to fully internalize

the most tested, complete, and studied dialect of Biblical
Hebrew,   BH according to the Masoretic Text.

Afterwards they will be able to study and compare other
dialects, and to do that more accurately and more
knowledgeably.

braxot
Randall


--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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