Here at Just the Bible Academy (my house) I teach biblical languages. The easiest way to learn a new language is to be born somewhere everyone, including your parents, speaks the language you wish to learn and grow up there.
Well, since the Be-Born-And-Grow-Up-There method isn’t possible for New Testament Greek and Biblical Hebrew, we have to use another approach. Having learned and taught a couple languages, I’ve picked up some pointers along the way. These are sound principles based on leaning theory, cognitive psychology, and personal experience. I take them so seriously that I write my syllabi and lesson plans around them.
1. MOTIVATION.
Learning a language is hard work. It takes a lot of motivation. I can’t be you, but I can tell you just a bit about what coerces me.
My motivation for offering these classes is many-fold. I could write a book with many chapters. However, I’ll limit myself to just two things. I hope you come to class and I hope you come to agree with me on these. First, reading and understanding the Bible is a persuaded indespensibility of mine. I’m old enough to remember black-and-white TV. It was great fun to watch those old shows, My Favorite Martian, Bonanza, etc. I didn’t realize just how much I was missing, though. The Bible is like that. It IS the milk of the soul. It is like no other book, variegated and yet indivisibly one. Frightening and comforting. From the first time you read just a few lines in the original language, it will be like going from old black-and-white to color so popping your eyes hurt and you’re on fire as your mind touches the very thoughts of Almighty God!
Second, have you ever seen a nature show where a momma bird regurgitates food for her chicks? That’s great for birds. I don’t eat that way. And I don’t want to experience God that way. What if you could go around the translator? What if you could see the text with all its previously unseen flora no translator can describe in a sentence? What if you could be in Isaiah’s skin when he writes “Holy! Holy! Holy!”–”Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh!”? What if you could think the thoughts of Ezekiel, rather than mere approximations?
Why not?
2. THE FOUR R‘S OF LANGUAGE LEARNING.
REPETITION. Repetition is the practice of viewing, hearing, writing, or saying new material over and over again. There is no substitute for simply going over and over the same material. After each lesson is assigned, break it down into parts small enough to handle as packages. Each package should consist only of items that are interrelated if possible. For instance, each lesson will have a batch of vocabulary words to learn. You may make a list of words, each with its definition, or you may wish to start a stack of vocabulary cards. I highly recommend the second. Go through them until you have them memorized. Then take other parts of the lesson. One part may be a new paradigm, such as a verb conjugation or a noun declension. Go over that until you can recite it. Do this until the entire lesson is recited at least once. Establishing the new material into Short Term Memory (STM) and starting the transition into Long Term Memory (LTM) is accomplished primarily by repetition.
REVIEW. Review is the practice of returning to material temporarily mastered. At this stage, the material has been established in STM, but not fully established in LTM. The review should be a long enough time from the last exposure to the material that it has begun to fade a bit, but not so long that it‘s nearly gone. Review will re-establish it in STM and further transfer it to LTM. The time between initial exposure and first review should be 4 to 36 hours. The next review may be 1 to 7 days depending on the student and the amount of rest the student is getting. These numbers are only my approximations, so find what works best for you. And by “best” I mean the method that gets the learning done with the least amount of time and effort.
RHYTHM. Closely related to review is rhythm. Rhythm is the practice of making study time short, regular, and frequent, rather than long and only once or twice a week. Just as physical exercise isn’t to be done for four hours every Saturday afternoon, mental exercise is best done with measured, planned, daily times than with cram sessions. Remember all those college exams? Remember the ones you didn’t properly prepare for ahead of time? They’re the ones you stayed up all night studying. We all know how much material you actually remembered from those tests long term and it isn’t much, is it? Biblical languages are more important than that.
There is a cyclical phenomenon in memory that goes like this: Exposure…fade…re-exposure…less fade…re-re-exposure…still less fade…and so forth. Use that to your advantage. This helps greatly in moving material from STM to LTM. If you use the practice of rhythm, you’ll actually spend less time and learn more! One hour of study is too long for most people. Study 20-30 minutes, then do something else. Even if you’re a student, you may wish to study something else, and that’s fine. Just get away from the vocab and paradigms you were studying. It’s an odd (but true) fact that 60 minutes at once will not net the same learning in either STM or LTM as 60 minutes broken up into 2, 3, or 4 sections. Allow at least twice as much time away as time spent studying between the sections you plan and the down time can be active or restful. Just get away from the material. (You can even do unrelated material in the same class. Lay down the vocab and pick up a declension. It’s best, though, to do something completely separate.)
REST. There is no substitute for sleep. In the previous section I discussed rhythm learning. Needless to say, this won’t work so well if your sleep was short. Nothing will work well if you’re sleep is missing. Don’t neglect it.
One last, but fantastic fact about rhythm learning and rest. Use your sleep cycle to your advantage. Study something for a few minutes just before bed. Sleep normally and get up normally. If you take just a very few minutes to review last night’s material, it is pushed hard into LTM. I don’t know why this is so, but it is. And it’s a cool trick. Even if you gulp your coffee and run to work, set your clock five or fifteen minutes earlier and go to bed a bit earlier. You’ll be amazed how well this works.
3. GENERAL HEALTH.
In addition to rest, a balanced diet and regular physical activity are important. As the brain functions in high capacity, as in language learning, it needs good blood supply. A sedentary lifestyle actually decreases brain function and IQ. A healthy brain will help you during both active learning times and those “down” times when you think you aren’t learning. When you aren’t studying the material, your brain will still be running in the background. STM is thought to be mainly electrical in nature, while LTM is accomplished by actual modifications to the chemistry and structure of the brain. Moving data from STM to LTM functionally and structurally changes the brain. New neural pathways and synapses are formed to better handle the new data. This requires nutrients such as proteins, just like the muscle growth that results from physical exercise. Eat a balanced diet and get your rest.
4. MULTIPLE MODALITIES IN LANGUAGE LEARNING.
You can buy vocabulary cards for Biblical Hebrew or New Testament Greek. Don’t. Here’s why: The time you spend going through all those cards to find the ones that correspond to the lesson of the day won’t be much less than the time to make your own and you’ll lose an important and fruitful memory builder. If you buy 3×5 note cards, they’re cheap and you can get a lot of memorization done simply by writing the words and their definitions yourself, because…
YOUR MEMORY HAS MORE THAN ONE DOOR IN! Your memory remembers in two ways. One is simple memory. This is rote learning. The other way your memory works is by synthesis of different information into a cohesive set of data. When you come to class, you will be learning by two modes right away. First, you’ll hear the teacher say the material. Second you’ll see him/her saying it, writing it, or acting it out. That’s why we prefer to use video conferencing, not just audio. But if you have a good teacher, he/she will also make you do the little kid thing and say it along with the rest of the class. Why does this work? In learning theory, there is something called modalities. Think of modalities as doors to memory or ways your memory finds cognitive handles for the data. A modality is a way of learning at the very most basic level of sensory input and motor output. If I see material that’s one modality. If I also hear it, that’s a second modality and my chance of remembering the material is increase greatly. If I then write the material myself, that’s a third modality. The first two were in sensory input. This third modality is in motor output, But notice this powerful fact: All motor output modalities are accompanied by at least one separate sensory input. In the case of writing the material, I get two additional sensory inputs. I feel myself writing it and I see the words going down on the page. If I say the material I also hear myself saying and feel myself saying it.
Use all the modalities every time you can. In the case of paradigms, write them and say them. I have a practice of reading them out loud three times, writing them three times, and reciting them three times. Notice I say them out loud. That gives me the auditory modality, increasing my chances of remembering them. If you’re not alone and might disturb someone (or they may think you’re disturbed) whisper, or even just mouth them, but use as many modalities as possible. By synthesizing the feeling of saying a word and it’s definition with the sound of the same, with the look of the word and its definition on paper, with the feel of writing it, you’ll learn much faster. Even muscle memory is involved here.
5. SYNTHESIS, SYNTHESIS, SYNTHESIS.
A significant amount of synthesis will take place naturally as we combine reading with grammar studies and speaking. We will learn a smattering of Modern Hebrew as an aid to Biblical Hebrew. Though the two have differences, the Modern Hebrew speaker can easily read Biblical Hebrew. This can be furthered by listening to Hebrew news programming available on the internet. This won’t be useful for at least the first few weeks since you won’t yet be able to understand much Hebrew, but as you progress you will find it helpful to listen to native speakers. Websites will be given in class when the time comes. If you get the chance to spend a few months in Israel, you can be in an immersion milieu. That is the ultimate learning environment because you will get all sorts of live input as you speak and listen and interact with others and with your environment.
Both in class and individually, whether in Hebrew or in Greek, our goal and our practice will be to read the text in its original language, not translating it into English. This is both difficult and rewarding. It will cause you to begin thinking in the language. You can think along with Paul and with Isaiah!!!!!
And THAT, after all, is our motivation.
God bless you as you labor hard in God’s vineyard,
Phil Perkins.
JUST THE BIBLE ACADEMY 