Hebrew book
Mar. 5th, 2006 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioWhat 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.)
Re: mostly off-topic
Date: 2006-03-12 12:09 am (UTC)Re: mostly off-topic
Date: 2006-03-12 10:45 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2006-03-12 10:46 pm (UTC)