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Hebrew book
What an excellent book! It gives me everything I need, including notes to satisfy my inner geek without disrupting the flow of the lessons. Each chapter revolves around one main concept (such as possessive nouns, or drop-letter imperfect verbs). Each chapter begins with some untranslated Hebrew to review; this is a a good test of whether you've forgotten anything important since the last lesson. It then presents a vocabulary list of about 15 words, with discussion of idiomatic uses where relevant, and then proceeds to the body of the lesson. This is followed by several standard types of exercises, followed (usually) by stories and guided readings. The stories are usually simplified tall tales and fables; the guided readings are from the book of Ruth (initially adapted, then not). The guided readings are translated (but in a format where you can try it first yourself); the stories are not.
I am being rigorous and doing all of the exercises (though not in writing). I initially worried about that; would I make systematic errors and learn things wrong? EKS sells an answer key, but in practice I don't feel the lack. The exercises do a good job of reinforcing each other, so if I generate a word incorrectly in one question I'm likely to see something in the next one that causes me to say "oh yeah, that was wrong". The exercises are well-written, balancing new and older material and throwing in just enough red herrings to keep me on my toes. (This afternoon, for example, in an exercise focused on possessives, I stared at "ha-baitah" for a good two minutes because it looked almost like "her house" but wasn't quite spelled right (nor was there a feminine noun in sight), but what else could it be?, and then I realizd that it ended with a hei of direction, so it was really "toward the house". I think that was intentional on their part, and that's a good thing.)
There is one style of exercise that I really really hate, but I also think it's really really good for me. (No one ever said life was free of pain.) They give a sentence with one underlined word, and then they give five or six words to substitute for that one (one at a time). The object is to rewrite the sentence for each substitution. Sound easy? Remember that number and gender can ripple through the sentence in lots of places -- change "Moshe" to "Sarah" in the subject and most of the verbs, possessives, and adjectives might change, for instance. Now add some subordinate clauses with different subjects, and it's not a global change. You have to really understand the sentence -- which is the goal.
Most chapters pull in some additional topics beyond the main one -- topics that wouldn't rate chapters of their own. This makes it a little harder to go back and review those ("ok, where was that discussion of yeish and ein again?"). An index might help with that, or perhaps adding page numbers to certain parts of the reference material.
The book has handy reference charts in the back showing the conjugations of all the verbs introduced in the book. There is also an abbreviated dictionary, containing (I assume) all the vocabulary introduced in the book. A useful addition to these might be charts showing the normal patterns of conjugations in the various tenses and binyanim; sure, you can infer it from looking at specific verbs, if you don't accidentally choose ones that are irregular, and you can go back to the chapters where they're introduced, but having it in one place for reference would seem to be helpful. Ditto for other patterns, like possessive endings.
I suspect that this book corresponds to one semester of a college course. I'm finding that each chapter tends to take me 3-4 hours to complete, and that there is great benefit to doing each chapter in a single sitting. (So that usually means Shabbat afternoons.) There are 30 chapters in the book.
I'm not sure what the next step is after this book. I can find no evidence of a second Hebrew primer on the publisher's web site. Maybe it's the case that the book really does give you all the building blocks, and after that it's a matter of building vocabulary. I'm not sure.
It's possible I'm doing this backwards; the college curricula I've been able to find start with 2-3 semesters of modern Hebrew, then one of biblical, and then (maybe) one of rabbinic/mishnaic Hebrew. I jumped straight to biblical, because my original goal was comprehension of source texts. That's still a goal, but there's value in learning the rest of it too, so I suspect my next step involves modern Hebrew. (This book does not assume prior knowledge of modern Hebrew, so there's no harm in starting here.)
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Let me know what your future steps are with learning Hebrew!
B'hatzlacha,
Shlomit
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Locally, the only options are (1) university classes that meet in the middle of the work day (and daily, so that's not going to work), and (2) light-weight classes in conversational Hebrew taught by the Jewish Education Institute. The latter meet one night a week for a couple hours, and, as the name implies, focus on conversational (not written) modern Hebrew. I took one round of that several years ago and it didn't work for me, but I'll probably try it again -- maybe the background I have now but didn't then will help. In May or June they do what they call an "ulpan" -- 3 nights a week, 3 hours a night, for two weeks (and I think a session on the Sunday afternoon in the middle). Maybe that would work better than the spread-out class -- and if not, the pain is over in two weeks. (They don't otherwise teach summer classes.)
starting backwards
We started with the first section of Mishna in the Gemara we had picked to learn, practicing that bit of Hebrew until she could read (with vowels & punctuation) and translate it well, and then moved on to the Gemara (standard page layout so no vowels or punctuation). It was very slow going at first, with lots of repetition, but it got easier as we went along, and then her Hebrew language skills got a big boost when she spent most of a year in Israel (although I don't think she learned any Gemara during that time). After she came back we switched to learning over the phone (having a standard page layout for Gemara has wonderful side-effects *g*) and eventually we finished that masechet of Gemara and started another, but then she moved to the mid-west and time and money constraints have put a stop to our weekly learning sessions, at least for now.
While it definitely wasn't the most standard order for learning skills, it worked out very well for her, and recently she was able to learn a (small) masechet of Mishna by herself during a weekend (it was for a siyum for a sheloshim, so time mattered). I think the main reason it worked was because she wanted to learn something "adult" instead of starting with something that had been simplified, and once she had subject matter that mattered to her she put in the attention and effort that was necessary, unlike her first go-round as a child in Hebrew School.
Re: starting backwards
I'd also like to be able to understand talmud without translation, eventually; when my rabbi and I study we do so mostly in English, but he reads the Hebrew/Aramaic and points out things in the grammar and literal versus idiomatic translations and stuff. I'd like to be able to do some of that on my own. I've found nothing in the way of courses or books that will take me there, though, without assuming several semesters of modern Hebrew first.
Modern Hebrew doesn't have the direct motivation that biblical and mishnaic do, but it has second-order motivation: it'll let me do things I can't otherwise do. So after I complete this book I'll likely move on to trying to learn modern Hebrew.
Besides, I might go on the next congregational trip to Israel (in December), so maybe knowing a little of the language other than, as Dani calls it, "ivrit shel shabbat" will do some good. :-)
Re: starting backwards
There are a couple of books by Yitzhak Frank that might interest you: "The Practical Talmud Dictionary" and "Grammar for Gemara". I don't think either assumes knowledge of Modern Hebrew, and a quick glance at the grammar book's preface says that it "presumes that the student has a basic familiarity with Biblical Hebrew" but doesn't mention Modern Hebrew at all.
There's also the possibility of using a translation to help you learn as you go. The 2 I'm most familiar with are the Artscroll and Steinsaltz translations. Artscroll doesn't always translate word for word (it's usually phrase by phrase) but the Hebrew/Aramaic pages are in standard format. Steinsaltz puts the Hebrew/Aramaic part into paragraph form (and puts in vowels and punctuation) and the translation is also in paragraph form with boldface used to indicate which parts are direct translation vs which are inserted to make the English make sense. I've never used the Steinsaltz English (although I often use his general reference guide to the Talmud), but I've used Artscroll with a couple of chevrutas and generally found it useful.
mostly off-topic
The reason that I thought to mention this now is that the most recent one just arrived, and there are a couple of articles on "women rabbis" (I'd think "female rabbis" would be a better term), including one on women who changed careers to become rabbis, which I thought might be interesting for you.
Re: mostly off-topic
Re: mostly off-topic
(Anonymous) 2006-03-12 10:45 pm (UTC)(link)There's a book which is basically a collection of those features. I don't remember the name, but it's by the same author...
Re: mostly off-topic