work surprise

[cellio]

It turns out that one of my coworkers has an MA in religious studies, used to be reasonably proficient in biblical Hebrew (with some clues about Aramaic too), and is interested in using that knowledge. Who knew?

So we're going to see if we can figure out some way to structure a one-lunch-slot-a-week session doing...something. I'm thinking that we can't go wrong by starting with straight translation; I'll bring in printouts of some narrative passages from torah (or maybe Joshua, Samuel, or Kings, but I can easily print torah), and read together. Printouts (as opposed to books) are important so we can mark up the Hebrew text to mark roots, grammar thingies, and the like.

Whee!

(So why did this person not respond to the note on my wiki page saying (in Hebrew) "if you can read this please talk to me"? Because she, like I, does not know modern conversational Hebrew.)

Comments

[cellio]

Yeah, I thought of that too. I think we'll be ok because (1) she's not Jewish (so it's text/language study more than religious bonding) and (2) we've had other informal off-the-clock lunchtime learning things (like the calculus group). But appearances will matter here, so we'll need to be careful if we do it in the office (which would certainly be the most convenient place to do it -- if we have to go to the lobby I guess we'll deal).