You should be aware that we have recently begun a new trek into Dr. C.L. Seow’s A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew, Rev. Ed. (Abingdon, 1995), which you can purchase here on Amazon. If you don’t have a copy of the textbook, it will be difficult for you to follow along and you will miss a lot of the material.

In the first session, which you can view here and is embedded below, Jonathan leads us through a generic introduction to the Hebrew aleph-bet. At this stage, which is actually a pre-textbook lesson, it is important to begin to learn the names of the letters and their sounds. On the presentation, we divided the letters up into several groups to make memorization easier.

Here I will simply present the letters in order. We tend to call it the “aleph-bet” in Hebrew based on the names of the first two letters, but it is truly an abjad because vowels are not represented directly.

Continue reading “Seow — Session 1” →

Four Strands of Language-Learning

In the last post, we talked about productive and receptive language skills, but there are more skills involved in language learning than these four. Paul Nation talks about “four strands” of language learning. He labels them: meaning-focused input (receptive skills), meaning-focused output (productive skills), language-focused learning, and fluency development. We have already talked about input and output here. This post, then, will focus on what Nation calls language-focused learning and fluency development. Continue reading “There Is Still More Learning To Do!” →

Shalom, Future Scholars!

We are absolutely thrilled to invite you to our brand new biblical Hebrew course, “Beginning Hebrew 101,” hosted on The Hebrew Café with YouTube Live!

🌟 Uncover the Ancient Wisdom: Dive into the fascinating world of Biblical Hebrew and unlock the secrets of ancient texts. This course will guide you step-by-step through the foundations of the language, making it accessible and engaging.

🎓 Engage with Expert Teachers: Learn from passionate instructors who are dedicated to your success. Our live sessions will provide you with personalized attention, interactive lessons, and the opportunity to ask questions in real-time in the live chat on YouTube.

Continue reading “Your Official Welcome” →

As preparation for your study of Hebrew together with us on YouTube Live, you are encouraged to do what you can to master the Hebrew alphabet (the “aleph-bet”) before our next meeting (Monday at 5:00pm EST).

In order to accomplish this, I would recommend two YouTube projects:

1. “Aleph with Beth” has put together a playlist intended to help you learn the aleph-bet. You can access it here.
2. Alternatively, our friends at Biblingo have also made a playlist to introduce students to the aleph-bet. You can access it here.

It is important that you learn to read the alphabet and sound out words as we start our course.

In our next session, we will review the alphabet and introduce the idea of academic transliteration. 

As always, feel free to ask questions here on this post, in our Facebook group, or on Discord. We’re eager for you to start your journey into biblical Hebrew!

See you then!

For those who are interested, this is where we currently stand. You can always check out our streams on YouTube under “Live” [link]. This includes a playlist with all of our Psalms readings, another with all of our Joshua readings, and another with all of our Hebrew-to-English translation sessions from Weingreen. We also have an unlisted playlist of the English-to-Hebrew translation exercises for our Patreon users.
Continue reading “Latest Updates for YouTube Live (Streams)” →