Interlinear + parallel text = the best single resource?

[AML]

Hi all,

As far as having a single resource goes, would you consider a book consisting of interlinear + parallel text (combined!) to be the ideal resource?
For example, if the interlinear text had three rows:

Row 1 (L2):
Row 2 (transliteration):
Row 3 (L1):

XXX YYY ZZZ
xxx yyy zzz
xxx yyy zzz

And then off to the side of the page is the parallel text.

https://www.amazon.com/Hebrew-English-Interlinear-ESV-Testament-Stuttgartensia/dp/1433501139
The link shows an example of a Bible with Hebrew and interlinear English, and then parallel text off to the side. If I wanted to learn Biblical Hebrew, I think this would be the single best resource.

[tommus]

That sort of resource would be excellent, as long as:

1. The material was interesting to the learner.
2. The material contained useful words, sentences, expressions and conversations.
3. You only wanted to learn to read. Ideally, combine it with at least the target language audio if you wanted to learn to listen.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Picking one single resource would not be my cup of tea, but the work of Geoffrey Steadman and others in Ancient Greek and Latin is a better way to go than what you link to. However, finding such a resource for languages other than the classics might be impossible. As far as that goes, the production of Steadman and others is rather slender. Making such texts is, I would have to assume, very exacting work and very time consuming.

Their format is superior to the book you showed because they supply not only vocabulary but also explanations of thorny points of grammar. I have to say, that IMHO, without some rudiments of grammar, even this format would cause a struggle.

Here's a link to one of Steadman's texts on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Herodotus-Histories-Book-Vocabulary-Commentary/dp/0984306587/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485974343&sr=8-1&keywords=steadman+herodotus

Others involved in this kind of work are Hayes and Nimis. The pioneer of this kind of work for the classics, so far as I know, was Clyde Pharr, who did a version of Vergil's Aeneid. The names of the handful of others escape me at the moment.

[emk]

https://www.amazon.com/Hebrew-English-Interlinear-ESV-Testament-Stuttgartensia/dp/1433501139
The link shows an example of a Bible with Hebrew and interlinear English, and then parallel text off to the side. If I wanted to learn Biblical Hebrew, I think this would be the single best resource.

That's a really nice bible edition! Assimil does something similar for non-Latin scripts:

1. Original script.
2. Transliteration.
3. Literal translation / gloss.
4. Free-form transliteration to convey meaning.

This allows you to understand texts far above your "real" level, and provides comprehensible input. I've written some thoughts about why I like that here. You can even do something similar with spaced repetition software. And of course, you can also use parallel text and audio very effectively.

But there's really no such thing as a "single best resource". Learning a language is a huge project, and you'll need many different resources along the way. And once you get out of the beginning stages (which, to be fair, most people never will for biblical Hebrew), learning is less about resources and more about using the language in a wide variety of realistic ways and sometimes getting feedback.

[Cainntear]

What's being described here isn't a million miles from Assimil (if you include the discussion of grammar) although Assimil's literal glosses are included alongside the translation rather than the original. And of course Assimil is intended to be used with audio, but can be used without it, which is why there are phonetic transcriptions of new words in some language versions.

[Steve]

The Mechon-Mamre.org site has links to MP3 files of all of the Hebrew books in the Bible. These are also hosted at talkingbibles.com. The pronunciation is referred to as Sephardic style.

I'd strongly encourage you to make use of these audio resources. I wasted years of effort trying to learn languages without a good audio base. (Much of this was pre-Internet era and audio was harder to find.) I found the forerunner to this site and learned a lot from successful language learners. One statement from Dr. Arguelles that stuck with me was about letting a new language have a voice in your head. That was something I had never done.

My first experiment with audio was with an old interlinear of Genesis and Exodus and the audio files mentioned above. I just started listening to the first few minutes of Genesis 1 over and over and tried to follow along. I made no attempt to learn the Hebrew alphabet except by association with the audio. After a few times, a few written words started to connect with the sounds and the english translation provided some meaning. After about a week, I discovered that looking at the printed Hebrew words was prompting the sound of the words in my memory and I was understanding it. This was a first for me with language learning. I stopped at that point since I had other things going on, but the experiment proved the point to me.

I'm now using Assimil for new languages and finding much more success than I had before.

[Steve]

I found a free PDF of the interlinear I referred to. It is by George Ricker Berry. Here's the link to Google books. https://books.google.com/books/about/Th ... hUAAAAYAAJ

It's from 1896. I've found some PDFs of interlinears of Greek classics from that era including Berry's Greek New Testament. I like interlinears from that era. Many were done of Latin and Greek classics. A very literal English translation is provided as the interlinear version. The typesetting includes numbers and parentheses around the English words to create the literal translation. Once I got used to it, I found them very helpful. I like these old ones much better than newer ones I've seen. Someone obviously put in a lot of effort into the typesetting of those old volumes.

About the same time, William Rainey Harper wrote a number of Hebrew grammar and lesson books. Many of these are available on Google books as well. A few of them run through Genesis verse by verse. There are a few major drawbacks to those. The first is that much effort is spent explaining pronunciation, spelling, and the like. This is largely unnecessary now with audio. The second is that this was from an era of memorizing grammar and paradigms and parsing sentences to death. I'd ignore the author's instructions and just skim the lessons for comments and explanations of the particular verses. I vaguely recall finding some more Hebrew grammars and lessons in the public domain that were from that era as well. I think they were on Google books as well. Being relatively new to Hebrew, I cannot comment on the quality of these sources. I'm not using these, but am aware they exist. I might refer to them in the future.

I'm focusing my main efforts on Greek and Spanish right now. I'm doing about 10-15 minutes of Hebrew a day as preparation for a more concerted effort a few years from now. On Jan 1, I started using Assimil's Hebrew course (from English). I'm in no rush, so I'm just doing a few lessons a week with the plan of getting the structure of the language into my head over the course of a year or so. At some point, I'll probably start using the OT audio again. From what I can tell, some people make a big deal about ancient Hebrew versus modern Hebrew. One native Israeli I knew in grad school noted that she could read ancient Hebrew with little trouble. According to her, the language seems somewhat archaic but understandable to an educated person.

[Iversen]

I have been experimenting a lot with interlinear texts, but now I almost exclusively use a format with two adjacent columns - it is much easier to produce bilingual texts in this format (and get the two columns aligned) than it is to cut both the original text and the translation into single lines and make these lines appear in the right order.

I do see the advantage of the interlinear format, but only for the example sentences in language guides or scientific treatises, and only if the translation is uncompromisingly hyperliteral so that each word or word combination in the translation can be placed directly under the corresponding item in the original. And such translations are rare, bordering on nonexistant outside the guides and scientific texts I mentioned - and of course textbooks with translations specifically made for the purpose. But I use Google Translate or bilingual sites to get my translations, and the correspondance there aren't so close that it is worth the trouble to adapt them to the interlinear format.

I also experimented with 'interspersed' formats where each sentence in one language is followed by the corresponding sentence in the other. But these are not only cumbersome to make, they are also confusing to use.

[Keys]

I sure think interlinear word-for-word literal translation is the best resource

To be honest, I think interlinear hyperliteral word-for-word translation with a parallel text to the side might make the target language (or mother language) more easily readable than having an extra idiomatic explanatory line in the interlinear like we have in our project (check out the books with the look inside mode):

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_1?rh ... nterlinear

If you like any of our material for free, just pm me!!! Ehh that would be the pdf+mp3 versions as I don't have the money to send everyone the new paperbacks ;P

Cheers