Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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86 of 89 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Biblical Hebrew Without Tears, July 5, 2001
Studying Hebrew can be a terrifying prospect for seminary students, and because many of the textbooks (such as Kelley, Weingreen, Mansour) are so inaccessible, lots of young pastors immediately forget most of what they learned. "The First Hebrew Primer" offers Hehrew without tears. Students who use this book (and it is used in many seminaries, but not enough) will learn easily and without pain. The book assumes students don't know the alphabet, then goes from there. Each day's work builds easily on the day before. If for each chapter one spends an hour with flashcards and two hours doing some of the exercises, one should have no trouble at all earning an A. The book has a whole year of Hebrew in a one semester textbook. The trick is leaving out a lot of the explanations for the many exceptions in Hebrew (often rare). The result is very fast progress. With every lesson the Hebrew Bible opens wider. In ten class periods my class was reading through Genesis, haltingly, but recognizing 50% to 75% of the words. By semester's end . . . reading just about anything with the help of a dictionary here and there. One could go through this by oneself, but it really is easier in a class. It's nice to have a teacher to answer questions and force one to prepare for a quiz. It's worth the tuition fee to have that help. But the nicest thing is that it's such an easy book to use that students don't feel their brains have frozen, leaving them unable to comprehend anything else. The person below who complained of gutterals not being called gutterals will be happy to hear that has changed, though if one isn't careful, one can learn about constructs, waw-consecutives, and various tenses without learning what they're called. A minor problem. It's true that one might like more examples from the Bible to translate, but when it comes down to it, we all have the Bibles anyway, so why not sinply turn to the source? Someone earning a Ph.D. in Hebrew would want something more detailed, perhaps, but when it comes down to it relatively few scholarly papers dealing with Hebrew actually require that level of expertise. Even the experts tend to turn to Hebrew grammars when they're working on that level.
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85 of 88 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Intro Text I've found, October 23, 2001
I'm currently teaching Intro Hebrew and have looked at a number of books on this topic. This Primer is the best text for this purpose that I've found by a long shot. Lessons are well arranged and, though simple, are not simplistic. Students have the opportunity to progress at a very high rate. The selection of vocabulary is wonderful with every word being a high-frequency word in the Hebrew Scriptures.The downfalls of this text are: 1) use of non-standard terms for grammatical features of the language - this is both a positive and a negative: positive in that it keeps the intimidation factor down for new students; negative in that for those students who go on from this book (and I suggest many will want to do so) need to learn the standard terms used by nearly every other grammar and text. 2) that's it; no other real downfalls. For what this text purports to be (A First Hebrew Primer) it succeeds magnificently! This book will not leave the student proficient, but that's not its purpose. My wife learned Hebrew by using Seow's Grammar for Biblical Hebrew - a great intro grammar, but horrible as an intro text. She can tell you about the minutiae of Hebrew, but has no love for it. I learned using the Primer and have seen many others who have learned by using it. The common factor is that a high-percentage of us now LOVE Hebrew, and couldn't wait to learn more about the finer points found in Seow.
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54 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Maybe passable but in some ways very weak, May 1, 2005
This was the first book I chose to learn Hebrew from. I later got another book to supplement my learning, and ended up abandoning this one and going to the other one entirely.
The lessons consist of vocabulary, an explanation of the topic of the lesson in clear language, and exercises which consist of translation of random sentences, of various "tall tales" such as The Gingerbread Boy which have been rendered in Hebrew, and of a simplified version of the Book of Ruth. The print is large and clear.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems. First of all, the book uses nonstandard terminology for various grammatical features. This is completely unnecessary - after all, the book has to explain what the word means either way - why not go ahead and use the terms that the rest of the Hebrew grammars use? Next, the book gives incomplete explanations or ignores entirely many features of Hebrew, some of which are absolutely necessary for reading even the simplest Biblical text.
As an example, take the explanation of the Dagesh in Chapter 3. From it, we find that the Dagesh changes the pronuncation of the Beged Kefet letters, and is usually found in those letters when they begin a word and not found in them when they end a word, and also that the letters aleph, hey, chet, ayin, and resh never take a dagesh. And that's it! That's all you learn about the Dagesh. No mention of the core fact of the Dagesh Forte - that it represents a doubling of the letter. It would have helped me immensely to understand that the Dagesh Lene represents the fact that the Masoretes pronounced bgdkft as stops when they followed a consonant, and as fricatives when they followed a vowel. With the explanation in this book, you don't even have enough information to determine whether a Dagesh in a bgd kft letter is a Dagesh Lene or Dagesh Forte. You cannot pronounce words correctly.
And it goes on like this - important things that you need to know to read the Bible are left out. I do not believe a student who completed this book would be ready to read the Bible.
I switched to Seow's A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew. It explains many details. Like a reviewer on the Amazon page for that book noted, I had many "Aha!" moments when reading it. And here's a tip: You don't have to memorize every detail of every grammatical feature at first. Just get the idea and move on, and flip back to earlier parts of the book when you need to. But the good thing is: the explanations are there for when you need them, whereas in this Primer they are nowhere to be found. (On the downside, you must go ahead and buy a Hebrew Bible and lexicon when you get Seow, because he has you working directly with those tools. But, really, that's not a downside after all, because you would need to buy them eventually anyway, and this way you get direct practice doing what you eventually must do: read REAL Hebrew text and use a lexicon.)
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