B-Hebrew: The Biblical Hebrew Forum

What grammar(s) do you prefer to use for teaching biblical Hebrew?

What do you find most effective in the specific grammar?

What do you find problematic in it?

Personally, I really like Karl Kutz & Rebecca Josberger’s Learning Biblical Hebrew: Reading for Comprehension, as I’ve stated before.

I love that they get students into reading Hebrew text very quickly. They have designed a reader/workbook to go along with the text, and from the very beginning it has lots of text for them to delve into.

It sorta bothers me that they leave weak verbs to the very end, but I think this is the trend nowadays. I learned weak verbs along with all the others using Seow’s A Grammar For Biblical Hebrew, so I think I got a good understanding of the morphological changes that these verbs undergo. Then again, I felt totally overwhelmed at the end of my first year of biblical Hebrew and almost didn’t enroll for the second year.

What do you use for teaching Hebrew? If you could develop your own grammar, what would you do differently?

Jason,

I like your two choices. My experience teaching Hebrew is a bit...different. I was in Hungary for 8 years and taught in Hungarian; my grammars were in Hungarian and the issues for the students were quite different from those who are English speakers. For example, Hungarian has verbless clauses, so there's no need for much explanation. On the other hand, verbal tenses was always a hard topic for them. Seow's is great, though, for English speakers and I would often recommend it to my Hungarian students who read English.