divine grammar

I've been slowly working my way through The First Hebrew Primer, which covers biblical (not modern) Hebrew. The book came recommended by several people. Dani, after flipping through it, said it seems like the perfect book for me except that they sometimes avoid using the real technical terms and he thinks that might bug me. We'll see.

So far, the book does seem to be pretty good. The examples are contrived; yes, you want to start with a small vocabulary, and I can tell that they've carefully chosen some words that could be confusing (to teach valuable lessons early), but I'm looking forward to the day when I can read sentences that are an improvement on, say, "a nation crossed over from Moav and it crossed over the mountains with animals and servants to the land and it guarded the city". Can you tell that so far we're just doing past-tense perfect verbs? (They have not named a binyan. I assume qal. I think that's one of those "real technical terms" that they might have a tendency to omit.) But hey, I can actually read and translate straightforward past-perfect sentences with a restricted vocabulary. :-)

I've noticed something odd. But I have to set it up.
( grammar geeking )