Let's chat! - Q&A after a year

Aleph with Beth

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shalom hi everyone we're coming up on a year of Aleph with Beth and we're so excited with the way that the channel has grown and we just want to say thank you a huge thank you to all of you who come along for the ride and who are supporting us through patreon or whatever ways and so we want to take this opportunity to say thank you wrap up the year wish y 'all a happy new year and answer a few questions that some of our patrons and supporters have submitted to us how many episodes are you planning to do and how far along in Hebrew will this get us what will we know or be able to read after your planned lessons are done we don't have a definite episode number in mind so much as a level that we hope to get people to where students who've been following along with all of our videos have basically the all the words in the

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Hebrew Bible that occur a hundred times or more so they've got those internalized and they've got the basic grammar level so that they could pick up a

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Hebrew Bible and not be totally lost now obviously when you get into poetry and stuff like that that's a whole other ballgame so even

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I with a deeper level of Hebrew still can't just pick up poetry and read that comfortably but our goal is to take students to a level where they could pick up a narrative portion of the

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Hebrew Bible and especially if they have a reader's edition or something that footnotes less frequent vocabulary they'd be able to basically follow along and read without extreme effort and without constantly looking at a lexicon like for every other word and then even after we get to that point

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Lord willing we'd love to continue making more videos with Bible stories comprehensible input just to keep building the library of stories and materials available for Hebrew students yeah we want to take this as far as we can so we're committed for the long run and we want to make comprehensible input like rich interesting extremely interesting content that people can be using for years to come so part of that is building a library that people can use that's extensive that's interesting for a wide range of people and so we enjoy doing this so much that why not just keep going as far as we can so we appreciate so much your encouragement the encouraging comments that we've gotten along the way that's kept us going over this year so much it's kept reaffirming to us how

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God has his hand in this and how this is something from him and we're excited to see how it blossoms in years to come the next question is how many hours go into making a single episode and that's a pretty simple answer is more than you probably think 30 or 40 hours something like that yeah especially as we've gotten into the more complex ones lately it's taking me longer and longer both to plan it and write out all the text and correct everything and and then also the filming you know it's getting more and more complex and then the editing takes longer and longer the more little bits of text and pictures

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I have to add and stuff like that so I'd say I easily spend between 20 and 30 hours editing a lesson video and then several hours planning at least several hours maybe five hours depending on the lesson and yeah an hour or two filming so it's a lot of work just so you know if you go on our website there's a behind -the -scenes link on there in the menu and if you want to know a lot of the detail the equipment we use how some of the planning goes into it you can see a lot of detail there that we've we've put into writing because we want to inspire and encourage other people to do the same thing we can't produce all the content that needs to be produced by ourselves right the other question here is how do you plan the episodes and how do you decide what order to introduce new material in and are you following or adapting from a certain grammar book so the answer to that as no we're not following a certain grammar book this is kind of our own path that we're forging as we go

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I have kind of a big -picture plan of where we want to get with the grammar points but really it's lesson by lesson seeing what

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I can fit in advancing us little by little thinking okay what kind of vocab will

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I need for maybe this next Bible story that I want to introduce then I try to make sure I introduce that vocab so that it's a little more familiar once we get to the

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Bible story I think a lot of people already know this but we're we're the first people doing this over a long series of videos doing something this at this scale has never been done before we want to do it well but it's new territory so it's very organic how it's coming together she said what versions or version of the

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Hebrew Bible do you recommend for practicing reading or approaching the text we use the

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BHS text so that's the standard

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I would say the most standard text of the Hebrew Bible that's what will be in the app that were producing as well we also like some readers editions there's a couple that are available that footnote less frequent vocab we just find that helpful so that you're not spending so much time flipping through a lexicon or something like that so you can enjoy the process of reading the text a little bit more so we make use of those and appreciate those so recommend that if you get to an intermediate point where you want to really dive into the text that's a helpful way to keep advancing so number five what are your jobs how do you have time to do this question well if we had other jobs we wouldn't have time to do this so I mean this is my full -time work at the moment and dedicated to this project yeah so my job

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I'm a translation consultant I think we've talked about this in other videos before basically my my role in Bible translation here specifically now in Latin America is to help those who are doing new translations into different languages that don't have a

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Bible yet I'm helping them I come alongside those teams and we use a trade language to communicate to ask questions and guide them and make sure their translation is really accurate and really quality and so there's a lot of translations that are going on right now that need consultants to help them and it's one of the biggest needs in Bible translation today so we've we've got our plates full but we love what we do so you make time for what you love and and God has given us a lot of grace and strength so we're thankful so we want to also just talk a bit about our personal lives first of all how do we meet all that you take it from there well we actually met in Israel appropriately enough for what we're doing right now

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I was there studying Hebrew at the Jerusalem Center for Bible translators and Andrew who was working in Equatorial Guinea in Central Africa at the time in Bible translation he was up in Israel visiting and so we met there in person and oh boy it was about nine months later we got married yeah so the

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Lord worked a miracle I didn't waste any time and yeah we're actually celebrating our third anniversary well filming mm -hmm so I were all dressed up yeah we have a lot of interests besides Hebrew and so my wife this is my chance to brag about her she just gave me this beautiful painting for see if they can see this for our anniversary she's done other amazing paintings you can follow on her

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Instagram I like dinosaurs so this is a girl with a baby dinosaur there's there's lots of amazing stuff she's produced and so she's an amazing linguist she has a master's in linguistics from the

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University of North Dakota and she's an amazing musician I try to make her play the piano as much as I can between editing videos and she plays the violin and clarinet and guitar and the drums and I do not play the guitar as well as this man does though he's a very good guitarist oh she speaks so many languages too she speaks

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Japanese which is an incredibly hard language and then she speaks

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Portuguese and Spanish she learned Spanish in five years better than most people learn it in 20 years so anyway that's all for me well some things you should know about Andrew is that he grew up here in Oaxaca Mexico where we are now living also speaks

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Spanish is an amazing musician and singer he's written a ton of songs especially a lot of scripture songs based in the

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Psalms and other texts which is a big reason I fell in love with this man his beautiful voice he's also an amazing author he's written two novels now which are just precious beautiful books the first one is

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Christina of Aspen Isle and then he just released the sequel Evangeline of a Sky Valley and he's also a podcaster and does a

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Bible translation podcast it's called working for the word you can check it out anywhere there's a podcast we both had really different approaches to learning

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Hebrew I went through well long long years of learning the traditional grammatical method and honestly it didn't work very well

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I'm so grateful for the background that I have in that method but at the same time

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I feel disappointed that I didn't get to do this kind of methodology from the beginning to create habits of learning and ways of thinking about the language and language learning that were more natural

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I think that the approach that you use for different languages is going to depend a lot on the kind of class that's available to you or the kind of materials that are available to you and so I've studied many different languages and each each case has been quite different just because of the different circumstances or different book that I had available and in the case of Hebrew I had the privilege of being able to study at a program that really valued a communicative approach and internalization and seeing the language used a lot in different activities and hearing it a lot and I found that that kind of approach has for me worked much better with long -term retention and really feeling like I own the basics so that was the approach that I had the privilege to learn

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Hebrew with in the first place as far as right now in my own advancement in Hebrew my approach is mostly just to try to read consistently be in the text and learn more vocabulary through seeing it in context in the text often

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I also like to listen to audio recordings of the text in Hebrew so that I'm just hearing those forms and the over and over and over after I finished my time at the

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Jerusalem Center for Bible translators one of the goals that I set to keep advancing in my Hebrew was just to read the text a lot so I tried to for a while I was trying to read three chapters a day of the narrative portions so started in Genesis and started working through so you read through Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy Joshua Judges Ruth first and second

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Samuel yep first Kings yeah we read first Kings together and we're about to finish second

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Kings reading together in the evenings so so just to give you idea that's how much reading she did in a about a year one of the things that the strategies that I've used to maintain my

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Hebrew is just to teach it I would just encourage people you know this is part of like making this go exponential making

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Hebrew and Greek part of normal Christian discipleship like we want it to become you know a good amount of Hebrew start teaching somebody else put yourself in that situation where you have a rhythm some accountability as a teacher to keep getting better and better that go a long way

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I think or start producing some simple materials in Hebrew and that will force you to learn your vowel pointing and all those rules much much better you'll have a better handle on the grammar as well it's really strengthened my

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Hebrew a lot actually to have to try to investigate the different grammar forms one of the things we would love to see is small groups and churches doing this together rather than in this like so many millions of Bible studies you could do as a small group but I've never heard of any small group saying we're just gonna we're just gonna take a year and learn

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Hebrew together you know that's it's not impossible that would be awesome we'd love to hear about that yeah we want to be really sympathetic to the people who don't have a passion for grammar right which is most people most people aren't just nerding out over syntax and grammatical structures and yeah rules and paradigms they're they're not they're not really interested in that stuff when

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I was in Equatorial Guinea I realized that this is an oral culture and you know by the way two -thirds of the world are oral cultures

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I had actually never lived in a such such an oral culture before and that was very impactful and I quickly realized when

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I was trying to teach Hebrew through the methodology that I was taught Hebrew the grammatical method it was totally ineffective for an oral culture and people there have an incredible capacity for learning languages it's amazing many of them speak three four languages and they did not learn any of those languages that they speak through a textbook and so that quickly clicked with me and I was like what they need to do is this kind of method they need this oral natural organic this is the way

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God created us to learn language method you know but they were given a chance to learn that way man there would be so many people who could learn

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Hebrew and Greek and in these sorts of contexts so that that was a big motivating factor for me to start

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Aleph with Beth the context of the majority of the world's cultures demands that we teach this way so that's what we're trying to do then to wrap this up I just wanted to give another plug for our website if you haven't visited there already it's full of lots of more detail about our vision and where we're going with this and also one of the questions we get a lot is why do we pronounce

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Hebrew the way we pronounce it in our videos and we have an entire article just about that right there you can check that out and get the full story of all the detail you can you can stomach one question we get a lot is do you have a

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Greek channel have you done Greek this way are you going to do Greek this way and our answer is we would love to see

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Greek done this way and we are praying you can pray with us that it happens just that it's not something we can do so it would depend on somebody else stepping up to the plate and taking this on as a same vision and mission to make it freely available in the same kind of format and go for the long haul and all that but we're certainly open to collaborating and helping anyone else who has this ability to teach

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Greek in this way wants to offer it completely for free the same way we're doing we would love to to talk to you we'd love to see how you teach and you know see if we can work together somehow so again thank you so much for coming along on this

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Hebrew journey we're so grateful for each and every one of you whether you're just a subscriber or whether you're supporting us on Patreon or some other way or whether you're one of our partners who is collaborating with us we're really grateful for each one of you we're really excited that Hebrew is more accessible to more people around the world thanks for helping be part of that for sharing it we know a lot of you recommended it to friends and we're really grateful for your help getting the word out so thanks so much and we hope you all have a really happy new year and God bless.