Well, I wasn't the most social of people during high school. The only socializing I did was at church and with those in my school's concert choir (who were also mostly members of my church). I was on the math league team, but I didn't really talk to the people who went to competition with me. I just did my tests, and even when I worked as part of a team, I found my own answers and then convinced them to follow my work. I wasn't big on working in teams, and I didn't enjoy hanging out with people in groups. When I did socialize outside of these frameworks, it was one-on-one. When it got any bigger, I got social anxiety and shut down. I just wasn't good with people.Kenneth Greifer wrote: ↑Thu Aug 19, 2021 7:46 am Jason,
Maybe I am asking you a personal question that you don't want to discuss, but I am really curious how much time you and Dewayne spent studying a language each day during high school or college. If you don't want to discuss that I understand. I think it would be interesting to know what worked for you two and any other people who are reading this discussion. I will try to look at the link you gave later.
I was really good at studying, though. It was in my senior year that I borrowed Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek from my pastor. One of my aunts purchased me my first Greek New Testament, and I managed to put together some money to get Mounce's Morphology of Biblical Greek for myself. I was the kind of kid who went home right after school, and while my mom was out, I lay down on the living room floor with books all around me and sheets of paper in piles. I copied paradigms from BBG up until the chapter on the imperfect tense (chapter 21, if I remember correctly). I was kinda obsessed, and it was at that point that I started memorizing New Testament verses in Greek. Hebrew didn't start with me until my second year of Bible college at 19 years old.
I found Spanish really easy. We used a textbook that focused on short vocabulary and grammar explanations with the emphasis on dialogues that students read to one another. I took my book home from school the first day of my junior year and read the whole book in a week. I just looked over the vocabulary and read the dialogues to myself. By the second week of Spanish 1, I got permission from my Spanish teacher (who passed away about two weeks ago, may her memory always be with me to inspire and remind me of human kindness) to sit in on her second-year class (which happened to be during my study hall period). I had to finish my first year, of course, but I was doing Spanish twice a day throughout my junior year. This didn't push me to fluency, but I didn't really have to spend too much time out-of-school studying Spanish. It came to me without struggle. Even in college, I did my degree in Spanish basically because it was after Bible college and I just wanted to finish a degree as quickly as I could. I didn't take the first two years of Spanish in college. I tested out for credit and started in the three-hundred level courses, which was the level of courses for those majoring in the language.
Hebrew did require a lot of study time, though. I found it more difficult in the beginning than either Spanish or Greek. We used Seow's textbook when I was first learning Hebrew, and after a few chapters he had some translation notes and assigned us to read portions of the Bible. I probably spent two hours per class on my Hebrew translation exercises outside of class, and I had class twice a week. I did the translation exercises quickly enough, but I read the Scripture passages several times. I would translate them according to the helps that Seow provided. Then, I'd read through them and try to make sense of them without the translations in front of me. And I read them until they made sense, and then I'd compare to a few translations to see if I was missing anything.
I didn't really start committing Hebrew texts to memory, though, until after I'd left Bible college (I left in my junior year because of a crisis of faith, one might say). The first texts that I memorized were the first creation day of Genesis 1, the Ten Commandments from Exodus 20, Psalm 1 and 23. That was where I started putting Hebrew into my soul.
My Hebrew prof told me that I was doing great with Hebrew during our first year, but I really felt that I was struggling. When we got out of the qal, it took me a while to adjust my thinking and absorb the idea of the different binyanim (especially because these aren't easily or clearly taught by anyone, I think). Hebrew didn't start to make good sense until my second year (when we translated through the Joseph Story and Hosea and looked at the Mesha Stele and Siloam Pool Inscription). Hebrew came to life for me, though, when I learned modern Hebrew as part of my plan to move to Israel and afterwards.
So, I guess it was about four hours of study a week outside of class, whereas the class itself was three hours per week (1.5 hours per day, twice a week).