[seumas] If Seumas ran your languages department, you’d be spending a lot more time acquiring languages, and you’d be a lot better at them by the end.
Category Archives: college
advice for theological students
[barb] 10 tips for theological students is a series of counter-examples and cautionary tales that you might find helpful if you’re thinking about theological study.
Hebrew week six
Not sure what it is about this subject. I’ve studied a lot before, even worked and studied before, I’ve learned a dead language before, but I’ve never had as much trouble learning something as I have with Hebrew. Part of this has been underestimating the amount of work that would be required. This has left …
hebrew week four
I’m starting to get the hang of catching the train in to college, and still having time to spare. This week, despite spending the whole trip practicing vocab, and then more time at breakfast (in a cafe in Burwood) revising vocab, I only managed to get 6/10 on the week’s test. This is a sign …
Hebrew week two
This week, instead of driving to college, I caught the train in. This meant I had some extra time to look at this week’s homework, which only took about 25 minutes to finish. I think I spent more time than that just tellin myself I could get to it later, and that I should concentrate …
Sometimes words have (more than) two meanings
One challenge that comes with learning Hebrew is when a word has multiple definitions. It’s worth trying to learn these definitions in order, since the earlier meanings occur more frequently than the later ones. This means that my vocab drill process is to look at the Hebrew characters, try to convert them straight to sounds, …
Continue reading “Sometimes words have (more than) two meanings”
Hebrew week one
With boot camp out of the way begins the first week of Hebrew proper. First up is a vocab test, with ten of the 20-odd vocab words needing to be translated from Hebrew squiggles to English. It looks like the repetitive work I’ve done with the vocab cards this week has helped, as I score …
hebrew boot camp day three
The third day of boot camp is one of consolidation and learning new rules. We went back over the vowels in a short test form (and I managed to forget the name of one, and mix up another… still more work to do) and then started learning the rules for syllables. Yes, this is day …
Hebrew boot camp day two
Today we did some revision – I now seem to have a reasonable handle on the consonants, and the Hebrew alphabetical order. Sadly, that was only 15 minutes out of the three hours, and so the rest was spent on new work: learning the Hebrew vowels. Because the original Hebrew scriptures had no vowel markings, …
hebrew boot camp day one
The first day of Hebrew boot camp is a three hour session where we learn about the course structure (in class tests, a mid-semester exam, and a final exam) We haven’t covered typing in Hebrew yet, so I may have mixed up some of the characters on this keyboard, but here’s what the Hebrew consonants …