ichthus

I got an interesting, “urgent”, email from my Hebrew Professor the week before Christmas – a few days after the exam finished.

He says “I’ve marked all of the exams and there’s probably really only one person who will be totally satisfied with their mark.” As a result he was “willing to give 20% bonus on the exam right away if you promise to do a bonus assignment to be handed in on the first day of class.”

LOL! Oh man. I knew that it wasn’t me – the only person who would be happy with his mark, that is. Because I looked up the verses we translated right after the exam (I forget what it is now) and I completely missed the aspect of one whole portion of the text. One part was supposed to be imperative (commands) but I translated it as simple past tense. Hahaha!

So I’m working on that translation project now… It “consists of translating all of Genesis 6.  The assignment must be typed on a computer and each verse must be placed on a separate line and be properly labelled.  Include footnotes for translations that are not obvious.” I’m done 3 verses already, and I have 2 more weeks to do it. But I’m working on it slowly…

Hahaha.

Coming up soon, the texts I’m using in both my Hebrew classes, and in my tutorials with Luis. I’m also going to be working on a syllabus for a course I’m designing for my church – to teach Hebrew to laypersons. That’s gonna be interesting!

Exams finished yesterday! I had 2 -

Greek Grammar on Thursday… It was a 3 hour exam that I finished in 45 minutes (30 minutes of writing, 15 of reviewing). Not that I’m super amazing in Greek… just that I studied REALLY HARD for it. We covered the first 12 chapters of our text book (David Allan Black’s grammar). And I’m pretty sure I’ve read those chapters at least 4 times each.

Oh and not that I’m doing really well with my Greek. I’m still having a lot of difficulties with memorizing Vocabulary – which anyone who has ever learned another language knows is pretty much integral to the whole process. I really need to step it up that’s all, but doing Hebrew at the same time is really messing with me..

That brings me to my second exam, the one yesterday, which was Hebrew Syntax. That was a 3 hour exam too, but unlike the Greek I took the entire 3 hours to finish it. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that that was the only time I’ve ever used up an entire exam period (I’ve taken maybe 25 exams for my undergrad at UofT).

It was really funny – or sad, depending on how you look at it – but with about 30 minutes left on the exam, I was kind of chillin’, taking my sweet time translating what I thought was the last verse. Good thing the prof had to make a correction on the last page of the exam… yup, I actually had 2 more verses to translate! Man that was close! God is good eh? Keeping me from doing stupid things like forgetting to answer an entire page of the exam!

Anyway, I expect decent grades for these two classes… not amazing. But decent…

Coming soon, just some reflections about learning the Original Biblical Languages, and why I think pretty much every Christian who actually reads the Bible should learn even the basic grammars…