Salve, amice!
Jim, thanks for your questions and for visiting my blog. I’ll start on the answers in a moment. Besides the Biblical languages (Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic), I also will have articles to encourage Latin study. Here’s a link to the first one, about the relation between the words Noel and Natalis, in relation to Christmas and Christmas songs: https://wp.me/p9aTup-4n.
There are also descriptions of ancient language learning resources online and links to them on my blog’s Resources page. I’ll be starting soon on a second Latin-related one, on the story behind the famous horned Moses (think Michaelangelo’s statue), based on the description of him in the Latin Bible after he met God on Mt. Sinai and received the Ten Commandments.
When I say “Don’t translate Hebrew. Do a Q & A instead”, here’s what I mean. Typically, Biblical Hebrew courses are taught in a less than optimal manner. There is lots of emphasis on grammar, particularly memorizing charts, especially of verbs. There is a lot of emphasis on learning vocabulary, but in lists that are not tied to a meaningful context. But there isn’t interaction with the language, active use of it. It is very passive. While teachers say they are teaching the student to read Hebrew, in fact, little actual reading is done in first- and second- year classes. Instead there is emphasis on translation from Hebrew. Hebrew is seldom interacted with and treated on its own terms.
There are several problems with this approach. The thing is, to be a competent translator you have to be competent in both the source language (Hebrew, in this case) and the target language. But, given the way that it is typically taught, not much competency is gained by first year or second year Biblical Hebrew students. You must understand well your source material to be a good translator. I have been a Spanish-English, English-Spanish interpreter and translator as part of my job for nearly ten years now, so I know something about that. People tend to treat the ancient languages as though they are different in how they function compared to modern ones. But this is wrong-headed. All languages function in similar ways, as far as what it takes to learn them and use them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a modern one or not.
So, instead of translating first thing to help understand a Biblical Hebrew text, I suggest interacting with it by asking and answering questions in Hebrew. This has the advantages of keeping you in the target language, and dealing with the language as a real language, not a dead fossil. I started learning to do this about a year ago. First, I began to learn and review the Biblical Hebrew question words (interrogatives) and typical sentence patterns used for questions. I then picked a simple narrative text in Exodus chapter 3 for practice. I formed the questions using the vocabulary in that text. I also formed the answers using vocabulary from the text. You can see how this was done in my blog posts. (I don’t know if you already have learned Biblical Hebrew, Jim. If you have specific questions about the way I did the exercise, feel free to ask.)
The Q & A is one aid to check reading comprehension. It is not a substitute for reading, but (I believe), a useful aid to it.
In another post I’ll show how to apply this to Latin.
