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

Celebrating the Channel’s First Year and Thanking Supporters

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 have 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 you all a Happy New Year and answer a few questions that some of our patrons and supporters.

How Far the Hebrew Lessons Will Take Students

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 all the words in the 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 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 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 Hebrew Bible and especially if they have a reader's edition or something that footnotes less frequent vocabulary, they would 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, 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 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 Time and Work Required to Make Each Episode

The next question is, how many hours go into making a single episode? That's a pretty simple answer. It's 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 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 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 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?

Planning Episodes Without a Grammar Book

So the answer to that is no, we're not following a certain grammar book. This is kind of our own path that we're forging as we go. 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 I can fit in, advancing us little by little, thinking,.

Okay,.

What kind of vocab will 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 Bible story.

I think a lot of people already know this, but we're the first people doing this over a long series of videos. Doing something 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, like she said.

What versions or version of the Hebrew Bible do you recommend for practicing reading or approaching the text? We use the BHS text, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, so that's the standard, I would say the most standard text of the Hebrew Bible.

That's what will be in the app that we're producing as well.

We also like some reader's 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.

Our Jobs and How We Met

So number five, what are your jobs? How do you have time to do this?

Yeah, good 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, I'm a translation consultant. I think we've talked about this in other videos before. Basically, 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 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. 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 got our plates full, but we love what we do. So you make time for what you love and God has given us a lot of grace and strength. So we're thankful. So we want to also just talk a little bit about our personal lives.

First of all, how do we meet?

I'll let you take it from there. Well, we actually met in Israel, appropriately enough for what we're doing right now. 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.

Boy, it was about nine months later. We got married. Yeah, so the Lord worked a miracle. I didn't waste any time. Yeah, we're actually celebrating our third anniversary today. We are. Wow. While we're filming.

Mm-hmm. That's why we're 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 Instagram. I like dinosaurs. So this is a girl with a baby dinosaur. 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 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 Japanese, which is an incredibly hard language, and then she speaks 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 Spanish, is an amazing musician and singer. He's written a ton of songs, especially a lot of scripture songs based in the 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 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 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 Hebrew. I went through a long, long years of learning the traditional grammatical method, and honestly, it didn't work very well.

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

Learning Hebrew Through Communication and Repetition

Yeah, 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 case has been quite different just because of the different circumstances or different book that I had available.

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've 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 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. I also like to listen to audio recordings of the text in Hebrew so that I'm just hearing those forms and the grammar over and over and over.

After I finished my time at the 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 for a while, I was trying to read three chapters a day of the narrative portions.

So I started in Genesis and just started working through.

So you read through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1st and 2nd Samuel?

Yep.

1st Kings?

Yeah, we read 1st Kings together and we're about to finish 2nd Kings that we've been reading together in the evenings as well.

So just to give you an idea, that's how much reading she did in about a year. One of the things that the strategies that I've used to maintain my Hebrew is just to teach it. I would just encourage people, you know, this is part of like making this go exponential, making Hebrew and Greek part of normal Christian discipleship like we want it to become.

If 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'll go a long way, 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 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. There's 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 take a year and learn Hebrew together.

You know, that'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 rules and paradigms. They're not. They're not really interested in that stuff.

When 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. I had actually never lived in such an oral culture before and that was very impactful.

And I quickly realized when 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 God created us to learn language method, if they were given a chance to learn that way, man, there would be so many people who could learn Hebrew and Greek in these sorts of contexts.

So that was a big motivating factor for me to start 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 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 stomach. One question we get a lot is do you have a 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 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 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 could work together somehow.

Looking Ahead, Greek, and a Final Thank You

So again, thank you so much for coming along on this 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 have 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. Shalom. Take care. Keep praying for us.