Chris Heard at Higgaion asked what teaching grammars people prefer for Hebrew. I just finished a year long Hebrew course, I thought I would give my thoughts on Mark Futato’s Beginning Biblical Hebrew. I have only taught Hebrew once, so this will not be a comparative review. Instead I will list what I found to be the pluses and minuses of this particular grammar.
On the plus side:
- Futato explains concepts well. He gives enough information to explain what is going on, but does not bog students down with a detailed description of every exception. It gives students enough to learn without overwhelming them.
- The exercises have a grading key in the back, even in the student version. If you have honest students who will use it well, this is helpful.
- The exercises move into complex sentences quickly, which helps the students develop proficiency.
- The exercises always have two or three sets aimed at the new material, three or four review material from previous chapters, one integrating the two, and a final exercise giving actual passages from the Bible for them to translate.
- Futato does a good job of focusing on what students will need to know most. He covers the qal, pi’el, hiph’il, and niph’al in depth, first giving the strong verbs and then the weak verbs.
- Futato is available in electronic format for those who use the Libronix system (the text program that powers Logos).
The minuses:
- There is no full chart giving the strong verb in all stems. Since this is one thing I require my students to memorize, it would be helpful.
- The treatment of the pu’al, hithpa’el, and hoph’al seems rather tacked on.
- Many of the exercises are not ones that you can have students turn in for grades. For the translation exercises, he gives the text in the left column and the translation in the right column. The right column is shifted down so that students can cover the answers with a sheet of paper for practice. But this makes it harder to have the students turn in the answers, which makes it more difficult to track their progress, particularly in a large class.
The book has 40 chapters, and we got through those with two weeks to spare in the second semester. Granted, the class my second semester was down to three students, all of whom were excellent and had experience learning languages. After all, I was teaching it at LCC where most students are trilingual, so we moved pretty quickly. On the other hand, we did a three week review of the first part of the book at the beginning of the second semester, due to the fact that I taught the first semester in the spring. But when we finished the book, my students had little problem reading the first two chapters of Ruth.
As I mentioned before, this is the first time I have taught Hebrew and this is the only grammar I have used, so I cannot say how it stacks up against others. But I hope the information given here will be helpful in making a decision. I liked Futato, but I would also want to look at a few other grammars when it is time for me to teach Hebrew again.