You can imagine my relief when a friend forwarded me an email announcing a new teaching grammar for biblical Hebrew. As I have said before, there are hardly any choices when it comes to Hebrew grammars so this will certainly be a welcome addition to the dreadful paucity of books on this subject. Also, the author of this grammar has come up with a really great pedagogical device of coining her own brand new term for the Hebrew past-tense verb: the “waw-past.” So, we can now add “waw-past” to the other names for this form such as “waw-consecutive,” “waw-conversive,” “narrative preterite,” “wayyiqtol,” “reversing waw”…
ALRIGHT!!!
I’ve never seen sarcasm actually drip from my computer screen before….
*shrug*
I guess I should have provided a squeegee along with this post.
Oy.
Do you think there has been no advances in the study of Hebrew nor advances in teaching methods, nor new methods? I think new options are always good. I’m very happy Brian Webster put out his new textbook last year— it’s awesome.
I can guarantee you that whether or not you like what I’m coming out with, you will say it is different. Greatly reduce pointing. Scrap vowel rules. Scrap paradigms. Begin with the third person, all tenses/aspects, and wait to move on to the 2nd and 1st. Oh, and I call it “converted to past” and “converted to future,” and the vav is a tense flipper (95% of the time). Give them unpointed Hebrew right along with the pointed Hebrew–from lesson 2 (lesson 1 is the aleph-bet). Give’m Piels right along with Qals (unpointed they are identical except a mem prefix for the Piel participle [and participles are introduced much later, right along with adjectives]). Scrap parsing. Oh, and yes, it does promote precise translation.