Friday, March 13, 2009

Hebrew Mnemonics

As I've been learning Hebrew over the past semesters, the discouraging lack of cognates with English has made Hebrew vocabulary much more difficult to learn than Greek vocabulary. Most of the other students in my classes have experienced the same difficulty, and I suspect many others who weren't in my classes have, too. I was amused almost daily by the creativity of the students' methods of remembering these words.

In order to preserve some of the best mnemonics, I typed some of them up, using mostly the ones that worked best (or were the funniest) for me or for my friends. Since I began working on collecting as many as I can, I've found this site by Ghil'ad Zuckermann, an Associate Professor in the field at Cambridge, which contains a short but helpful list of nice, quirky mnemonics, but for apparently modern Hebrew.

My goal is to have a catchy mnemonic for every word that occurs in the Hebrew Bible 50 times or more, so, on to the reason for this post:
if you are taking or have taken Hebrew and have a great mnemonic for a vocabulary item, put it in the comments. I'll collect them and send all of the contributors a copy. I'm working through them in order of frequency, and I've got about 80 solid mnemonics. Send away!

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Free Bible

I'm really hoping I win this drawing from a great blog by David Porter called "A Boomer in the Pew", which I just found through Justin Taylor's blog and enjoyed looking over. Check it out!