You heard me, I hated it.
I’m not a visual person. So it’s no wonder that I hated the charts, the comics, the pictures, the diagrams (which thy used to explain linguistic phenomena). It was a different book – a book so different that it rattled me tot my core.
Ok, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration.
Though I hated the book, Hebrew was still my favorite. And now, I could study under one of the first Hebrew scholars that uses linguistics as his basis of understanding, rather than traditional exegesis.
Once I learned that, things began to change. I watched as the students WEREN’T struggling in learning the language to the point that they had previously. From the beginning, the students were better-equipped to READ the text than they had been. I could tell a difference, even in the first few weeks of class, that Cook and Holmstedt’s teaching model(s) was the superior one. Furthermore, I realized that while I wasn’t a visual learner, lots of people were. Which means that the comics – which I so hated – were actually very useful. Eventually, I learned to put my biases aside and let other people learn the best ways they can.
Cook and Holmstedt’s grammar helped put into focus what I have been telling my students for years—the best way to learn Hebrew (or any language, for that matter) is to “read it, see it, write it, and say it.” Cook’s grammar was actually doing something extraordinary—something that I hadn’t realized up until that point in 2008.
In their grammar, Cook and Holmstedt were using ALL of the elements that I believed were necessary to learning Hebrew. I’d seen it in action; I could no longer ignore it:
I was a convert. I’ve been using it in all my classes. It’s a gem.
Go and see for yourself.
Biblical Hebrew: A Grammar and Illustrated Reader is available at Amazon.com and other retailers.