How To Learn Hebrew/Aramaic Vocabulary Course Contents
Overview
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Welcome to this Course on How To Learn Hebrew and/or Aramaic Vocabulary. While the examples given here are primarily focused on Hebrew for convenience, exactly the same principles apply to Biblical Hebrew as well as to Biblical Aramaic, and even to Biblical Greek, too.
In this Course, you will learn how to learn vocabulary. You will first examine a number of common approaches, but then you will take a more systematic approach to learning the most common words first, followed by learning how to bulk-learn vocabulary using methods such as spreadsheets. Using Bible software such as BibleWorks and Accordance is also useful, to help you observe the words occurring in the Biblical text.
This Course is highly recommended to everyone, and is an excellent starting point before learning more Biblical Hebrew and/or Aramaic grammar, as well as taking other more detailed and systematic courses in Biblical Hebrew and/or Biblical Aramaic.
Stage 1 - Understand Which Approaches Work Best
To start with, and especially if you just want to learn a relatively small number of words, it is essential to understand the different possible approaches - and why some approaches work better than others, and why some approaches may not work at all!
We highly recommend that you buy, or make, Flashcards for the words that you want to learn. Flashcards are an easy yet effective way to help you learn vocabulary, and are much better than other approaches. They are very practical, and they allow you to shuffle words in and out of separate piles as you learn them.
The following tips will help you:
- Practice little and often - for several minutes at a time, repeatedly throughout the day.
- Remove Flashcards once you have learned them, but still re-test yourself with those words at a later time.
- Create separate piles of Flashcards for words you now know, for words you are currently learning, and for words you do not (yet) know.
- Spend more time with the words you find the most difficult.
Stage 2 - Understand Why You Should Learn The Commonest Words First
Once you have experimented with Stage 1 for a while, you next need to understand the tremendous value of learning vocabulary as the first step towards understanding the Biblical text, and why learning the commonest words first can have such an enormous impact. Watch the videos below to explain this.
Stage 3 - Systematically Learn HOW To Learn Vocabulary
For the next Stage, you need to systematically learn how to learn Vocabulary. You need to kick-start the process by learning Vocabulary (and lots of it). But first, you need to learn how to learn vocabulary. How do you learn lots of words? Where do you even start? How do you create your own custom word lists? You will cover all that in the next series of video lessons below.
NOTE: To view the Hebrew fonts in the spreadsheets below, you need to first download and install the BibleWorks Hebrew fonts.
Stage 4 - Take Learning Vocabulary Even Further
For this next Stage, we want to expand in more detail the use of spreadsheets to systematically bulk-learn vocabulary. Please watch the video lessons below.
Stage 5 - Course Completion
You complete this Course when you have fully understood everything in this Course - but more importantly, when you have put it into practice. Try doing something that you have never done before, and which you did not previously think was possible - such as learning ALL the words in an entire book of the Bible, or learning the top 1000 words. Then work your way through the Bible text to see where those words occur. If you have done this correctly, you will find that you are now making faster progress than ever before, and you can recognise enough words to more than understand the gist of the passage that you are studying.
By the way, you would not believe the number of people who will watch these videos, and then think they have "done" the Course - but then not put any of it into practice! To get the most from this Course, actually make a list of hundreds and hundreds of words, and actually learn them! You will find these approaches actually work!
This Course is intended to be very practical, and is what has been found to work in practice. I learned the entire vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible and the Aramaic New Testament in a relatively short time, using exactly these methods! These methods work, and are not just theory!