Vols. 1 and 2 and the syllabus.
Week 3 – Nouns, Article ה, and the Conjunction ו
Review vowels and go over names assignment in workbook. Vocalize out-loud as a class. Encourage them to make loud mistakes.
On to the lesson-
Students just need the basic frame, the relevant page numbers in the textbook, and some problems to mess up. Our goal is to paint broad strokes and let them see the details as they work.
The basic, stripped-down Biblical Hebrew to American English frame for us will quickly be-
book
the book
and the book
books
the books
and the books
From here, they need to get to (with pointing)-
ספר
הספר
והספר
ספרים
הספרים
והספרים
Then talk about grammatical gender. For brand-newbies, its easiest and fastest to not explain everything, but rather give general rules that aren’t really rules. Here, we say, “Every noun that ends in ה or ת is feminine.” Not true. But it’ll work for now.
Jeff Foxworthy tells a joke about his father stopping his mother from preventing young Jeff from crawling under a TV-dinner-tray-stand that was supporting an actual TV instead of someone’s TV-dinner. His father said, “He’ll learn.”
We don’t want to drop TVs on our students heads, but their Hebrew instruction will hurt at times and that’s actually a good thing. Anyway…
Pick your favorite feminine noun and do an example for them (noun, he + noun, vav+he+noun, then again in plural). Then turn ‘em lose on the parsing exercises in the workbook. The others can be helpful, but are expendable if time is an issue.
Part of their workbook work is not just the exercises, but vocalizing everything they do.
If they aren’t in a coma while they’re working, they’ll realize that there’s another inflection for number (dual) that wasn’t talked about. If they know how to use a book, it won’t be an issue. But we’ll see next class.
Thanks for continuing to post these. I’ll let you know what the syllabus for the 2-week, 60-hour Hebrew course in China looks like when it is actually finished. My friend is right now trying to figure out how to communicate the “definite article” because apparently Mandarin has no such animal. And (believe it or not), prepositions are a bit of a nightmare too. She says “inseparable prepositions were a bit tough to explain. Chinese has too many ways of wording things without prepositions. Just have to keep at it…”
I’m trying to start a collection of “intensive” Biblical Hebrew course syllabi. This kind of course is not ideal, but it occurs with great frequency, so we need to think through the best way to handle the curriculum. If any of your readers have a syllabus hanging around, they can send it to me on the contact page of my blog.