Hebrew

[cellio]

I feel like I'm on the verge of being able to translate (certain simple) torah passages, albeit sometimes with the aid of a dictionary. But I've been approaching the problem wrong, trying to first identify the root and then apply the prefixes and suffixes. If, instead, I figure out those first, that can give me better hints about the root -- and sometimes will strip off something that I thought was part of the root and that just ended up distracting me. Now that I think about it that explicitly, this is what the rabbi was doing in the classes at HUC, too. So I need to memorize some of the prefixes (there are a couple I tend to mix up or otherwise forget). But I think I get how to do this now in a way that I didn't before. (Thanks to Dani for pointing out the problem.)

I'm going to take my biblical-Hebrew primer with me to Pennsic. There's always downtime at Pennsic, after all. I'm also taking my next torah portion (Eikev, three weeks away) to practice, but I was already planning on that.

(And speaking of that, I'm finding Eikev much easier to learn than the last portion I did, which was Chukat. I haven't been practicing it well enough to read from the unpointed column reliably, mind, but it's feeling much smoother. Which is good, because it's also longer! But my rabbi already told me that he doesn't expect me to do the whole thing myself; he can fill in what I don't do.)

Comments

Pennsic

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

G & I won't be there, but if you happen to see a "Clan MacIvrie" (possibly a different spelling, camping with Ostgardr(?)), feel free to say "hi" as a friend of a friend. They're trying to get us hooked in the SCA too, but so far we haven't had time for adding something of that level of commitment.

Re: Pennsic

[cellio]

I got email from some newcomers from Ostgardr (asking about local options for kosher food, particularly meat). The person I've been corresponding with is Matthew. If that's the same group of people, I'll say hi when I join him for Shabbat dinner. :-)

Re: Pennsic

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

I don't know for certain if it's the same people, but there is a "Matt" in the group I know. 'Twould be an interesting "small world" if it is the same bunch, since I met you going through a different set of people. *g*

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

That's how I strip down Japanese verbs as well, actually--everything is done by tacking on multiple suffixes, so successively pulling off the common ones gets you down to something you can look up in a dictionary. The trick is when the root verb happens to end in sounds that are also a common suffix.

[cellio]

I think part of why I was doing it wrong is that I'd look at a page of text, say "hey, I recognize that root!" for some small number of words, and then try to go from root to modifiers. But it's really easier if you go the other way, and recognizing the root just means you can skip the dictionary lookup and be a little more confident that you've correctly pulled off all the non-root stuff.