You don't need 16 years to learn Ancient Hebrew

In Joe Rogan’s recent podcast conversation with apologist/scholar Wes Huff, he mentioned that he has a friend who spent 16 years learning biblical Hebrew. That’s some serious dedication, but should it take that long to learn an ancient language?

Ancient Hebrew and Greek, but especially Hebrew, are often assumed to be very difficult languages to learn. Rogan seems to buy into this assumption.

I have to say that spending 16 years on any single thing is impressive in terms of the dedication required. However, it shouldn’t take you 16 years to learn Hebrew. If someone said that they learned Spanish in 16 years, you would probably think that they were just very bad at learning languages or were not very dedicated to it. But when someone takes 16 years to learn Ancient Hebrew, many do not question why it would take so long. Wes, however, does seem to hint that it really shouldn’t take that long.

I suggest that the problem here is not Hebrew itself, but how we’re going about learning Hebrew. Let me give you a real-life example. Here’s a video of my four-year-old son reading Hebrew after a few months of studying it:

So what’s the difference between my son, who is four and is reading Hebrew, and Rogan’s friend, who took 16 years to learn the language? The issue is this: not all methods of learning a language are as efficient. It is not about the language’s difficulty, but about how we go about learning.

The learning process is actually pretty simple. We expose ourselves to new material, and then we practice that new material to commit it to long-term memory. Where this often goes haywire is the process of committing it to long-term memory.

But this is exactly what my son did. He took the alphabet to begin with, and he started to learn the letters. He committed those letters to long-term memory. He then used those letters to commit words composed of those letters to long-term memory. And then finally, he was given a text with words that had been committed to his long-term memory already. Since he had followed that progression, he could read that text in a matter of a few short months.

Now, he can’t yet read the Bible in Hebrew, but he’s on his way – and it won’t take him 16 years. The key is that you need to progress in such a way that you are adding one new thing, committing that thing to long-term memory, and then adding another new thing. When you progress in this way, eventually you will reach your goal of reading the Bible in Hebrew.

If you practice consistently with the right tools, you actually will be able to read in Hebrew or Greek much, much quicker than most people think. Reading the Bible in a year is definitely an achievable goal. And we have had Biblingo users report just that. Ancient Hebrew and Greek are not special–they can be learned like any other languages with the right tools and methods. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can sign up for Biblingo’s free 10-day trial at app.biblingo.org/signup.

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