My recent Boulders2Bits contest asked readers to submit suggestions for vocabulary resources. Here’s the first (of two) posts giving an annotated list of the suggestions.

Actually, two people (Joseph Kelly and Colin Toffelmire) suggested this first one.

I have used this program in conjunction with Landes: Building Your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary Learning Words by Frequency and Cognate: http://home.earthlink.net/~vikn/hebrew.htm These two resources work well together.

Here’s my entry: http://home.earthlink.net/~vikn/hebrew.htm
It does Hebrew and Greek, has options for flashcards, multiple-choice, fill in the blank, or a combo of those. And the kicker? Totally free!

I like this resource and will continue to use it. It has a very easy user interface, well organized word lists (for beginner through advanced based on word category and frequency), and a variety of tools (drill, flashcards, quiz).

I did notice at least one spelling error and could not find a way to email the developer to submit a correction.

Daniel&Tonya submitted the following.

Learning Mill’s Intelex (now discontinued, but I can hook someone up with an old version) http://www.learningmill.org/ We used this program to do vocab during our undergrad years. Its a flashcard quiz program. You’re shown the Hebrew word, it is vocalized, then you have to type in an acceptable English gloss. It was invaluable to us in years past. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated, so you have to run it in Windows or Tiger. Won’t work with Leopard.

I too was disappointed that Intelex is no longer supported (current users can still log in). The website describes what I think would be a useful tool. However, you can only “look” and not “taste” at the link. Too bad! If you are using Windows or Tiger and want to give it a try, send me an email.

Andrew Vogel likes Og.

I wonder if I could use Og the Terrible comic series? I think you mentioned him in a prior post. Definitely my favorite for learning Hebrew vocabulary though. http://www.ekspublishing.com/childrens-books/og-the-terrible-comic-book-introduction-to-prayerbook

Yes, I have mentioned these comics in a previous post.

    
These colorful comic books feature Og the Terrible. The vocabulary is very simple biblical Hebrew (but not biblical text). The three books include a running translation on each page, a full glossary and a page-by-page translation. These are a nice supplement, but they won’t build the vocabulary a student would need to read the Bible.

Richard draws our attention over the pond:

My entry is: http://www.freechurchseminary.org/Vocabulary%20Videos.html

This resource from the Free Church Seminary (Inverness, Scotland) has video clips for 415 Hebrew vocabulary words. For each set of vocabulary words, you can watch a video and listen to the speaker pronounce the Hebrew word (2x), say an English gloss (2x), then say a mnemonic to help remember the word (and then repeat the whole thing). I am sure all of us have used mnemonics as part of our studies, however, I do think that sometimes our mnemonics reinforce incorrect semantic domains (where we connote a particular meaning in our English mnemonic that is not viable in the semantic domain of the Hebrew).

These videos are from Scotland, so the speaker has a Scottish accent (which sometimes makes the mnemonic not quite work in American English). The audio track often includes some humorous sound effects. There are flashcards (with the same photos and mnemonics as the videos) for each vocabulary word. The videos are probably most helpful in learning the vocabulary and not for practicing the vocabulary, since it takes so long to listen to each word. In addition to the vocabulary resources, there are reading notes for assigned texts and grammar lecture videos.
  

Taty Gaona and Andrew Vogel both submitted the following resource (Come on everyone, read the rules carefully next time. You were supposed to check to make sure no one had already submitted your idea!):

I will submit this webpage: http://www.hebrew-verbs.co.il/ I’ve found it useful, although not recently unfortunately.

This website allows you to choose an English gloss, and the Hebrew parsing (as general or restricted as you like) and then the program will generate a list of the conjugations for that Hebrew verb.

Ken Brown gives us a suggestion that we can carry around.

There’s the iVocab program, which includes the 1000 or so most common lexemes on audio-visual flashcards readable for your iPod. It also includes pre-made playlists for each of the vocab lists accompanying in several intro Hebrew Grammars. I have both the Greek and Hebrew versions and found them useful, though installing them was a bit cumbersome. http://store.kregel.com/productdetails.cfm?PC=1809

I have used this in the past (probably the first version), but I felt the program was inconvenient to load, slow, memory intensive and not as helpful as others out there, so I took it off my iPod. Still, it may be something that others find useful. The graphics for the vocabulary are very nice and the word lists are keyed to 8 common beginning grammars. Adam Couturier wrote a helpful review of the current version of this program on his blog this past July.

Ze’ev Clementson draws our attention to great reading resource.

John Dyer’s program allows you to select a portion of the Bible text to read, highlights parts of speech, provides translation of words (with online popups), and allows you to print off the text with a list of translations for words that appear x times or less in the Bible (useful for when you want to read the text without a computer and need definitions for only words that you’re not likely to have encountered before). The program is still a “work in progress” (it sometimes doesn’t provide correct translations, morphology still isn’t implemented, there are bugs, etc); however, it is usable as is and should be a nice resource for someone learning Biblical Hebrew or Greek. It’s also a nice example of how a computer can be used to help take the tedious aspect of acquiring a vocabulary and make it actually fun and interesting.The program is here: http://bible.johndyer.name/
John’s blog post that describes it is here: http://donteatthefruit.com/2009/04/read-the-bible-greek-and-hebrew-reading-experiment/#more-26 John Dyer wrote a different variation on this theme (I prefer the original, but I think he plans to further enhance only this latest one) here: http://biblewebapp.com/study/#ref=Genesis%201:1|ver=he_wlc,en_net

I like the idea of this online reader. It allows the user to decide how much help they need, and then generates a text with tools based on user input. So, for example, you can ask for all the verbs to be shown in green and the nouns in red (or when a student feels more confident they can leave the colors “off”), and you can have glosses provided for words below a certain frequency. However, for a beginning student, I think the number of translation errors (i.e., glosses provided) would be confusing or frustrating.

I’ll post the second half of the vocabulary resources soon!