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Great Language Resources One of the greatest needs in contemporary Catholic apologetics is more people who speak other languages--not only the biblical ones (though these are the most important apologetically) but also contemporary languages like Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Arabic. Here I’m going to recommend some resources to make filling that need easier.
Talking the Talk Except for sign languages, the main form of every language is spoken. We sometimes forget that, particularly when focusing on dead languages that now exist only in written form, like the dialects of the Bible. If you really want to learn a language, learning to speak it is what you need to do. That’s the way our brains are designed to learn languages, and that’s why children learn to speak before they learn to write. You also don’t need to be taught a lot of complicated grammar. It’s possible to start by learning how to converse with others (instead of waiting until second or third semester to study the conversational art of a language). All you need is what children learning their first language have: exposure to the language and a chance to practice speaking it. Unfortunately, most of us can’t afford to take a total immersion course, but there is a language program that is a good substitute. It was developed by a language teacher named Paul Pimsleur, and his Pimsleur Method is by far the easiest way I’ve found to learn to speak a language. Here’s how it works: Each Pimsleur course comes with a set of audio tapes or CDs containing 30-minute lessons. (Get the CDs; they’ll last longer than audio tapes, so you can go back and review the language in future years.) Every day, you do one lesson, simply listening to the CD (which features native speakers conversing) and repeating what you are asked to repeat. I can’t adequately express how much easier it is learning a language by this method than by traditional methods. There is no complicated grammar instruction; you learn to talk by talking. This is quite different from traditional methods, which want you to memorize lots of grammar (tables of verb and noun endings, for example). Neither does the method do what virtually every other program forces you to do: Study on your own by doing memory drills after you’ve finished your lesson. In Pimsleur, there is no after-lesson drilling to be done. When you’ve finished your half-hour lesson, you’re done studying for the day. There are two drawbacks to the Pimsleur study materials. First, they are kind of expensive. Buying a set of thirty lessons on CD is more expensive than buying a book, but the extra expense is worth it (especially when compared to the cost of taking a class). Fortunately, it’s possible to get the materials more cheaply. Almost nobody pays full retail price for these. They are regularly discounted. The least expensive way I’ve found to buy Pimsleur is to get one of the small, starter kits (extra-cheap on eBay), then call the manufacturer, and they’ll give you a couple of discounts that will bring the cost of a Level 1 Pimsleur set down to less than a hundred dollars. The other limitation is that as of right now the series is only available for modern languages. There is an impressive number of languages available (Italian, French, German, and Spanish are only the beginning), but none are the biblical languages. With one exception: Hebrew. Modern Hebrew is sufficiently close to biblical Hebrew that if you want to learn the latter, I would suggest that you start by doing Pimsleur’s modern Hebrew course. That will get you a running start for studying the biblical form of the language, and take a lot of the fear out of it. Though focused on speech, the Pimsleur Hebrew course also includes a booklet that in conjunction with the CDs will give you a pain-free way to learn something else students find intimidating: the Hebrew alphabet.
Alphabet Soup Many students of the biblical languages are intimidated by the different alphabets they use. Standard editions of the Bible in the original use two alphabets: Greek and Hebrew. If you want to read related works in Aramaic, you’ll need to learn a third alphabet. Often times the thought of learning another alphabet gives people the willies, but it really isn’t that hard. Alphabets typically have only twenty to thirty characters. That’s not many. Anybody can do that, and in a very short time. The Greek alphabet is the easiest since it only has twenty-four letters and half of them look like stylized versions of English letters that we already know (alpha looks like a stylized a, beta looks like a stylized b, etc.). Anybody can teach himself to read the Greek alphabet using flashcards in a few hours. The Hebrew alphabet (which is really a modified form of the Aramaic alphabet) is a little harder. It’s strange-looking “square letters” can be confusing at first, particularly because the difference between two letters sometimes is only how long a particular stroke is. But still, we’re only talking about a twenty-two letter alphabet, plus fifteen or so vowel signs. Anybody can teach himself to read the Hebrew alphabet using flashcards in a few days. If you’re reading biblical Aramaic, it uses the Hebrew alphabet, so you don’t have to learn anything new. If you’re reading the Aramaic liturgy or the Pshitta (the major Aramaic translation of the Bible) then you’ll need to learn a different alphabet, but it also has twenty-two letters, and only seven vowels. It’s also related to the Hebrew alphabet, which makes it easier. The Aramaic alphabet is easier to learn than Hebrew, and let me recommend a book to you if you want to learn it: Classical Aramaic: Book 1 by Rocco Errico and Fr. Michael Bazzi. This is a workbook that teaches the alphabet and will give you a hundred or so vocabulary words. The Arabic alphabet looks very intimidating to most Westerners because it is cursive, but it is easier than it looks. It has only twenty nine letters and six vowel signs. If you want to learn it (and we need more Arabic-reading apologists), let me recommend The Arabic Alphabet by Nicholas Awde and Putros Samano, a short book that will teach you what you need to know.
Learning to Read In the last few years the textbooks available on the biblical languages have been improving dramatically. A hundred years ago, when the most famous grammars were written, textbooks on Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were often monstrously large, overbuilt, highly technical works that were not adapted to the needs of the beginning student. They were basically reference grammars that a scholar would use after he already knew the language. Now there are textbooks that are far easier to learn from, that use innovative teaching techniques, and that make it as easy on the student as possible. The best example of this approach that is currently on the market is a text called Basics of Biblical Greek by William Mounce. This also has a workbook that goes with it. It is head and shoulders above the other New Testament Greek textbooks out there, and I heartily recommend it. When I teach Greek, I teach from this book. Of course, there is always room for improvement, and I think there are things one could do to write a better introductory text. For example, Mounce places too much emphasis on morphology, or how words get formed, but a teacher can simply have the student ignore places where Mounce goes overboard. One nice thing about Mounce's text for self-study students is that from Mounce's website you can order audio copies of Mounce's own lectures on the book. I’m afraid that there isn’t a perfect equivalent to Mounce for the other biblical languages, at least not yet. Mounce’s publisher, Zondervan, has come out with a Basics of Biblical Hebrew (Miles van Pelt and Gary Pratico) that tries to do for Hebrew what Mounce did for Greek. It’s a good text, but not quite up to the same standard. It also has a workbook that goes with it. As a result, let me recommend a few additional Hebrew grammars you might want to use: Beginning Biblical Hebrew (Mark Futato), A Modern Grammar for Classical Hebrew (Duane Garrett), and Biblical Hebrew: An Introductory Grammar (Page Kelley). I’ve chosen these because they are among the easier Hebrew grammars to use. To tell you the truth, my favorite beginning Hebrew grammar for ease of use is Essentials of Biblical Hebrew by Kyle Yates, but it’s out of print, so you would have to find it through a used book service. As I noted above, though, I think the easiest way to learn biblical Hebrew at present is by using Pimsleur Hebrew (be sure get an intro set and then call to get the discounts so that it'll be less than a third of the list-price cost) to study how to speak the modern version of the language, which is close enough to the classical that it will make using any of the above texts far easier. For Aramaic, there really aren’t any beginners texts that I consider satisfactory for self-study. Most of the ones that are out there assume that you already know Hebrew, and if you don’t then they won’t help you. Probably the best one for the beginning student who wants to learn the language on his own is Introduction to Syriac (Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic) by Wheeler Thackston. It has some idiosyncrasies, but it’s probably the best self-teaching book out there for now. For Latin, a deutero-biblical language due to the Vulgate, you would think there would be an embarrassment of riches to choose from, but there’s not—at least not if you’re learning ecclesiastical or “church” Latin. This differs from classical Latin in pronunciation and in a few matters of vocabulary and grammar, and though there are plenty of good, introductory texts for classical Latin, there aren’t for ecclesiastical Latin. The text that I learned from was A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin by John Collins, which is the major recent grammar. I had a great teacher, but boy did I hate this textbook. Collins’ method of instruction is horrible. He presents grammatical concepts in a higgledy-piggledy and unduly drawn-out order, with poor explanation and inadequate examples. This is tolerable if you have a teacher to fill in the gaps, but the text is totally unsuited to self-study. There are a few other grammars of ecclesiastical Latin out there, but they tend to be older (meaning that they are likely to be harder for the self-study student to use), and I’m not as familiar with them at this point, so I don’t want to recommend any. Let me make an alternative suggestion: To compensate for the deficiencies of Collins, use a short, easy-to-use classical Latin grammar and then, once you have the basics of the language down, tackle Collins. The one I’d recommend is Learn Latin by Peter Jones. This is a short book that originally appeared in England as a series of newspaper columns that proved so popular they were collected in book form. It’s user-friendly, good for self-study, and does cover some ecclesiastical Latin. One note of caution: If you use a classical Latin grammar, be sure that you learn ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation. The two are not quite the same. If the text you use doesn’t have a section on ecclesiastical pronunciation, check the Web and get the info there.
Further Resources There are many good language resources besides grammars. One of the most useful are vocabulary building resources, such as Greek and Hebrew flashcards. You can also make your own flashcards or download a flashcard program off the Web and program it with the vocabulary of whatever language textbook you’re using. A book that is good for vocabulary building are Warren Trenchard’s Complete Vocabulary Guide to the Greek New Testament. This not only has a complete list of New Testament words sorted by frequency (so you can learn the most common words first), it also has a lot of other helpful tools. A similar work is The Vocabulary Guide to Biblical Hebrew by Miles van Pelt and Gary Pratico. It also contains a frequency-sorted list of the vocabulary of the Hebrew Old Testament, letting you bone up on the most important words quickly. Another kind of language tool is the interlinear. This is a text that has the original language on one line and a jerky, word-by-word translation immediately below it on another line. Usually there also is a smooth translation in a side column. Often I am asked to recommend “a Catholic interlinear,” but my response invariably is “You don’t need one.” The controversy concerning what Bible you read applies to how it is translated and what books it includes, but these are largely irrelevant to interlinears. What most people are after when they ask for an interlinear is an interlinear New Testament. Between Catholics and Protestants there is no substantive disagreement about the Greek text of the New Testament, and the translation question is largely mooted since the whole point of an interlinear is looking at what the Greek says rather than simply relying on someone’s translation of it. As a result, almost any interlinear (except the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ deceptive Kingdom Interlinear) will do. It would be nice to have an interlinear of the Catholic Old Testament, but it would (a) be huge, (b) be enormously expensive, and (c) have four languages in it (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and English). In any event, I’m not aware of one, so if one really wants an Old Testament interlinear one would probably have to make do with a Hebrew interlinear and a Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) interlinear. Of special note is Mounce’s The NIV English-Greek New Testament. This is an interlinear Bible with English as the dominant line (meaning that the Greek is rearranged to fit English word order). This is not as useful as a regular interlinear (e.g., you can’t quote phrases or sentences from the Greek since the word order has been altered), but it is a useful tool for those who are not ready for a normal interlinear. One caution about interlinears: They are not for language study. Do not use an interlinear while you are studying a language. Use it before or after. If you use it while you are studying, you will become dependant on the English line and not lean the language the way you need to. Another thing I am often asked to recommend is “a Catholic concordance.” Again, my response is: “You don’t need one.” First, the existing Catholic concordances are based on lousy, non-literal translations and are inferior to the Protestant concordances that are out there. Second, you shouldn’t waste your money on a concordance at all because Bible study software blows concordances out of the water and makes them completely obsolete. With a concordance you can look up only the occurrences of one word at a time. Not a problem if it’s a rare word, but if it’s a common word with dozens or hundreds of occurrences then finding the text you want will take forever. If you only could cross-reference occurrences of your term with the occurrences of another term you remember occurs in the same passage. That would shrink the list of verses you have to look through dramatically. Well, that’s what Bible study software allows you to do (along with a lot of other fancy word search things). There is basically no point in spending money on a concordance anymore. Either get yourself Bible software (some of which is very inexpensive or even free) or just use the search features at BibleGateway.Com. A language tool you will want is a dictionary. There are many dictionaries out there for Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and even Aramaic (though the latter are harder to find). But let me call attention to an especially useful work: William Mounce’s Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament. This is a dictionary that lists every Greek word in the New Testament in every form that the word takes. It also analyzes the grammar of the different forms and offers basic definitions. Let me recommend one final language resource that is useful for the beginner. Not everybody is ready to take the plunge and start learning one of the Biblical languages. That doesn’t mean that people in this situation can’t benefit by having some exposure to the language. Interlinears, dictionaries, and other language tools can help provide some of that exposure, but you need help understanding some of what you will find in them. To that end, let me recommend another work by William Mounce: Greek for the Rest of Us, a book to give one some exposure to Greek and the role it can play in Bible study, without having to make the full commitment to learning the language. If you’re not ready to take the plunge with biblical Greek, this is the book to get.
Parting Advice What I’ve covered so far are only a fraction of the language resources that are out there. There are many other resources, including many good ones that I don’t have space to list. The one that are here can serve as a starting point. I’ve recommended these on the assumption that you want to do self-study. If you have a teacher then the question of what resources to use is simpler: You have to use what your teacher says (though you can always supplement that with my suggestions). If you can get a teacher, do so. The accountability involved in taking a class from someone (even if you aren’t tested and graded) will help you learn the language much better than studying it on your own generally will. I’m highly motivated to study languages, but I find that I usually do better if I have a teacher I meet with every week than if I don’t. You can find teachers in many places: Local colleges, seminaries (including Protestant ones), synagogues, etc. If you can’t find a class in the evening and can’t go to one during the day, see about getting a private tutor. Call a local language teacher and ask him to recommend one (perhaps one of his better students). If you can’t afford to pay, offer something in trade. That was the deal when I first took Greek: The tutor would teach Greek and get Latin instruction in exchange. Whatever you do, get started! Apologetics needs more people who know other languages, especially the biblical ones.
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