12.21 Hebrew GRAMMAR Quest is a Quest for RECOGNITION, NOT RECALL

Older Hebrew Grammars focused on memorizing dozens of verb paradigm charts
- Students had to memorize many different stems, conjugations, as well as strong and weak verb paradigms in those conjugations
In this course, you will memorize only a handful of paradigms in the Qal Stem
From here, we will be on a quest for pattern recognition
Think of it like this: instead of taking a traditional approach to learning a language by brute-force, rote memorization, we are going to take more of a mathematical approach
- A mathematician doesn’t brute-force memorize the solution to every possible problem
- She or he uses a series of formulas and plugs the specifics into the most appropriate formula for the situation
- For example, consider the formula for the area of a square: \(Area = S^2\) - the length of one of its sides multiplied by itself
- Studying Hebrew the old way would require you to memorize the areas of hundreds of different squares
- It is much simpler to memorize the formula
- Then when you encounter a square that has a side \(S = 5\), you can use the formula: \(5^2\) to get the answer of \(Area = 25\)
- If the next square you encounter has \(S = 3\), you can use the same formula to get the answer \(9\).
You will begin to see things in a special \(formula font\) - we will use \(this font\) when there are consistent patterns
- For example, whenever you see \(Pre =\), this tells you that the verb has a specific combination of prefixes/preformative letters, vowels, and possibly Dagesh Forte marks that are characteristic of that verb class

Don’t be afraid of math! Math will be your partner in learning Hebrew verbs!