Gideon and the neighbor girl

Because there's just too much Hebrew lately

Hebrew Update

The stack on the left is my Greek vocabulary and paradigms from Greek 1, 2, and 3.  The stack on the right is my vocabulary for Hebrew 1.  That's only vocabulary and is sitting pretty at 282 words after 3.5 weeks of class.  I am still greatly enjoying Hebrew, and aside from bonehead mistakes (there's really no way to fix stupid), I am understanding the concepts and what happens.  Professor Goldstein has allowed me to use a piece of blank paper for the quiz, so I sit and write this out each quiz in an effort to minimize bonehead mistakes (which I still did today).  

Not that you care, but the above includes all the forms for the Qal pattern (which is 69% of the Hebrew.  There are 6 more patterns in Hebrew.  Each pattern has all these forms.  Today we started learning the Piel pattern, which includes 9% of the  verbs in the Hebrew.  

Isn't summer language great?  

Hebrew Primer

So basically my life is being swallowed up studing the Hebrew language this summer.  Two proofs.  First, people are asking Kathee how life is as a "Hebrew widow."  As a side, there are also "Greek widows," but since I opted not to take summer Greek last year, this is our first (and hopefully only) go of summer language.  Second, I'm having dreams about Hebrew.  

So here goes.  I have class Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 9-12.  During that time we take a quiz each day that essentially cumulatively covers everything that has been covered before, but focuses on the last class period.  Each quiz has a parsing section, vocabulary section, translation section, and filling out paradigms section.  It takes about 30-35 minutes to complete each one.  

After class, then, I go home and eat lunch.  After the first week of class (and trying to do too much), I learned that it is important for me to go for an hour or hour and a half bike ride to decompress.  I get home and study from aroud 3-4:30.  I then hang with the family from 4:30-8:00, and then study from 8-midnight.  

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I study from 9-noon, 1:30-4:30, and then 8-11:30 or midnight.  It's pretty intense.  

So here's my attempt at show you what I'm doing.   

First, the alphabet.  It is made up of 23 consonants (the original Hebrew didn't have written vowels).  Also, Hebrew is read from the right side of the page to the left (backwards of what we do).    

Back in the day, the Masorites added vowels so the Hebrew could be read (if you've ever heard of the Masoritic Text, this is what they are talking about).  These vowels are written directly underneath (or sometimes alongside) the consonant.  And oh yeah, Hebrew words are normally made up of three consonants.  Then vowels are added underneath.  Then prefixes or suffixes are added based on what you are trying to say.  

So here are the vowels.  So if the consonant on top were a Yod (looks like our apostrophe and has the same sound as our "y") and a Patach were underneath, the sound you would make would be "yah." 

More vowels

More vowels

Since 60% of the Hebrew Bible is in the Qal, we start by learning all the Qal constructs and then whe we get to others, we'll compare them to the Qal.  So the Qal Perfect are verbs in the perfect, or completed, tense.  So Chatall in third person, masculine, singular is "he killed."  "We killed," is first person, common, plural, is pronounced Kah-tall-new.  The vowels underneath, and the endings remain the same regardless of the three letter root word that is placed.    

Next we learned the Qal Imperfect, or incompleted (future) action.  You'll notice that the vowels and endings all changed but the root "kill" has remained.  That helps in parsing out the verb (which we have to do on each quiz (Professor Goldstein will put 10 words or so and we have boxes where we have to write: Qal, Perfect (or Imperfect, or now Infinitive Absolute or Infinitive Construct), 3, M, P, Root word PUL, translation:  he killed.  Lots of moving parts as you can see.  

We also did pronouns, which are stand-alone words in a sentence.  

These are also stand-alone words.

Basic noun and adjective endings are evident.  The root is samick, vowel shureq, samick.  That means horse.  So in the feminine it means mare.  He laughed when I asked if I could translate the masculine, then, as studs.  

The possessive suffixes are added to the end of nouns, to make them "his horse," "their horses," etc.  There are also possessive suffix endings for plural, and feminine plural endings.  

On Wednesday, we covered Qal Infinitives.  There are two types:  Infinitive construct (where, depending on the prefix added, we'd translate it "to kill" or "when" or "in the day."  With Infinitive absolutes, we would translate it "certainly" he killed.  Or "certainly" he will kill.  

So that's where we are.  

Oh yeah, vocab.  There are 10 new vocab words in each chapter of the book.  We cover either 2 or 3 chapters per day.  That's 80 new vocab words per week (because we roughly cover 3 chapters on Mondays and Fridays and 2 chapters on Wednesday).  

Needless to say, it's a ton of work.  A ton of work.  

And after I had an awful day the second day of class, and as I was complaining outside to Kathee, a lady who lives next door was moving her stuff out (she just got married a few weeks ago).  As she walked by she heard me, stopped, and said, "I can help you with Hebrew."  So we started a conversation.  She's a Hebrew tutor.  I said I need any help she can give, so we set up a time to meet. She emailed some of the other Hebrew tutors.  I talked to a couple buddies who are in the other section of Hebrew (but we are covering the same material in the same time) who said they'd love the help.  So now we have a standing time of Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3pm-4:30 where one of the Hebrew tutors shows up at the library and tutors us.  It's pretty awesome!  

That's it for now.  I wanted to post more things tonight, but this post kinda got away from me.  Hope it helpful to see what I'm doing.  I love studying Hebrew.  Just like Greek, I'm not a natural, but I work my tail off and think I'm doing fairly well.  It's funny, I wanted to be able to read the Greek New Testament since junior high.  I never thought Hebrew would be a possibility.  And really, wasn't all that interested in it.  I am enjoying this time in my life, even if it's stressful.  There is just something beautiful about being able to study God's Word in the original languages.  Not saying anything bad about translations (I use them all the time).  There's just something awesome about what I get to do.  

Be blessed (and forgive the unedited writing of this entry tonight).