Complete Biblical Hebrew: Teach Yourself

Helped me immensely with my university course!!

I bought the book on reading some positive reviews and must say that I am very disappointed on quite a few accounts.First from a purely typesetting perspective - The hebrew vowel marks are so tiny as to be almost illegible - Book should come with a freely provided magnifying glass!Ok now, to the method....The author uses a very odd transcription system - which I assume is supposed to facilitate an approximate pronunciation by English speakers.Such techniques might be popular in cheap travel phrase books (and the results can be guaranteed to puzzle the natives), but they are totally unsuited to any serious language study.The system proposed fails on many accounts :It is based on extremely simplified phonetics which only roughly approximate the phonology of ancient Hebrew.In fact for a "biblical" Hebrew book the phonology is awfully close to that of modern Israeli Hebrew.The problem is not that you're not going to be understood by the natives (they are all long dead).. but that the phonology is essential to understand some of the grammatical and orthography features of the language.The system is completely bespoke and the author does not even deign to mention that there are well established transliteration systems used in ancient Hebrew and semitic studies.... Any one wanting to further their studies after going through Teach Yourself will have to "unlearn" this system and learn another one.~~On another subject, The writing guidance proposed in annex 1 is also puzzling as it introduces a mix of forms borrowed both from the "cursive" and the "block" traditions of handwriting.... Besides a few examples of handwritten texts would not have been amiss there.~~I must admit I have not gone through the whole book, but I have also found some of the attempts at oversimplifying the grammar confusing at best and misleading at worst....~~To conclude... while I am by no means a fan of the traditional "paradigmatic" approach to ancient Hebrew teaching, I feel that this book really misses the mark by trying to oversimplify and spoon-feed biblical Hebrew to learners.IMHO this does them a great disservice.Ancient Hebrew is a beautiful and challenging language, learning it requires effort and dedication...this book cuts too many corners.Even though it is now getting very aged the previous TY Biblical Hebrew Book by R K Harrison (1950's I believe) was far superior to this new version.

Good for study and delivery ok good price too. If you are wanting to study this language buy this extra aid