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  • From: "Phil King" <phil_king AT sil.org>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Active/visual ways to teach stems and conjugations
  • Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:09:07 -0400

I’m teaching a course in Biblical Hebrew starting next week to Papua New
Guinean Bible Translators and looking for some ideas to teach stems and
conjugations in ways that will ‘stick’ and that don’t rely too much on
English.

This will be the second course for all these folk, who have already taken a
course based half on Randy Buth’s Living Biblical Hebrew, half on
dramatizations of the Elijah stories. So they are able to read Hebrew writing
fairly well, and have an intuitive grasp of basic grammar, but haven’t yet
been exposed to much, if any, grammatical terminology. I have them for four
weeks and want to try and create a bridge from their elementary intuitive
understanding of the grammar and vocabulary to a stage where they can relate
to lexicons, commentaries, software etc. that refer to qal, piel, hiphil,…
and perfect, imperfect, imperative etc…

The challenge is that these folks all come from different language groups,
have limited English, and very limited linguistic background. Also I’m trying
to get them to think of grammatical categories through the categories of
their own vernaculars rather than through English (or Latin) categories. So I
like to do things through pictures, drama and action – to help them
cognitively link straight from Hebrew to their own vernaculars without
getting bogged down in English in between.

I’m wondering if anyone has any resources or ideas for pictures, dramas or
actions that could help them conceptually grasp the different stems and the
different conjugations? For example, perhaps we could act out together
qatalti, niqtalti, qitalti, hiqtalti, hitqatalti (excuse the spellings) in a
way that would give them a visual ‘peg’ to hang the stem concepts onto – but
as this root is actually so rare in Biblical Hebrew, and I’m not totally sure
what qitalti would mean – I wonder if anyone has other ideas? I’d been
thinking sh-b-r might be easier – although I’m not sure how to act out ‘being
broken’. Is there another good root which actually shows up in several
different stems, that could be somewhat easily acted out? Or does anyone have
a good set of different verbs – one for each conjugation – that could be
acted out?

For conjugations, I’ve seen Greek books which represent aorist as a dot and
other tenses as lines or sequences of dots, but I’m not sure that really
works for perfect vs. imperfect. Nor an idea someone else used for Greek with
people stepping forward for future and backwards for aorist – that would
suggest too much tense orientation for the Hebrew to my mind, as opposed to
aspect or other interpretations of the different forms. Are there established
visual ways of conceptualizing the meanings of Hebrew conjugations, that we
could either draw or act out?

Has anyone else ever done anything like this, or have any ideas they could
share?

Thanks,
Phil King
SIL PNG



PS. I know that many lexicographers would teach different stems as entirely
separate semantic entities, and so that would undermine the idea here – but
in terms of using lexicons and relating to other grammar books, the root and
stem approach is still going to give them some conceptual help.




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