Bartimaeus Alliance of the Blind, Inc.
BABINC

Index to Hebrew Study Aids


Taking Hebrew From Another Instructor

If you are taking Hebrew from another instructor, this Hebrew I course may still be of significant use to you. Below are a few ways that having access to this material, even in someone else's class, with someone else's text books, may help.

1) The text books for this course and all the free materials mentioned in the course syllabus will still be of help. The morphology tables by Christo et al will give you access to the various forms of Hebrew nouns and verbs without having to have a sighted reader dictate, letter-by-letter, each of the many forms. The Hebrew Bible with parsing guides can still help you with word-by-word analysis of Bible passages. The importance of the Hebrew Bible files hardly needs explanation.

Even the Weingreen text book can be helpful. Since this text book is divided into dozens of short sections, one may consult the table of contents in Weingreen to find the specific section relevant to whatever is covered in class on a certain day and read it from Weingreen. The student would still be expected to be familiar with what his/her official text book says, but a great deal of useful knowledge can be gained from Weingreen. When it comes to doing exercises for classk, the student would still need to have someone in the class go through their specific text book. This could be done a number of ways. First, the exercises could be done together, with the two students working as a team to do the exercises. If the teacher wants more individual thinking, the sighted student could read the exercises out loud and then the two of them could silently translate them.

2) The course materials here may be of some help. The material in Lesson 1 about getting started reading Hebrew is similar in most Hebrew courses. It would do a blind student much good to spend considerable time with this course's Lesson 1, no matter where he/she is taking Hebrew. There is a song to help one learn the letters and guided Braille Hebrew readings designed to help the student master reading Hebrew. This lesson also explains the unique aspects of Braille Hebrew and how Braille Hebrew differs from print Hebrew. Lessons 7 and 13 contain information about Unicode Hebrew, reading and writing it. This is necessary for handling Hebrew in a sighted world. The core materials of Lesson 14 discuss how to use the parsing guides. Lesson 15's core materials tell how to use the Hebrew-English lexicon that comes with the text books for this course. The file named "Course Contents by Lesson" explains which grammatical concepts are discussed in each lesson so one can look them up at any time. Whenever someone studies construct relationships, he/she can look up the concept in the course contents and read about it from this course. Finally, the appendix section to this course contains lists of vocabulary words by frequency, going down to as few as those occurring 100 times or more. This can save the student time in typing vocabulary words.