Filling a gap in resources for learning biblical hebrew

There are plenty of great resources for learning biblical Hebrew, and plenty of pages out there that curate those resources. For instance, there are libguides from school’s like Tyndale seminary or the page hosted by the University of Alberta, and especially the great list of resources on the great website Daily Dose of Biblical Hebrew.

Despite all of the resources out there, there was still a gap in resources. It was the same gap I saw over a decade ago when I create ParseGreek for learning Biblical Greek. Repetition and practice is so important when learning language, and even the best grammars only provide so many exercises to do. In particular, the identifying and correct parsing of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs occupies a huge amount of space within introductory grammars. There simply is no option out there to easily keep quizzing yourself with parsing drills – this is where my newly release app ParseHebrew comes into play.

ParseHebrew is a mobile app that fills the gap in electronic resources for learning biblical Hebrew by providing parsing drills. The app is compatible with the 11 top intro biblical Hebrew grammars, and contains over 12,000 morphological forms. More advanced users can study using common study sets, and study by frequency.

The compatibility with intro grammars means the quizzes can be specifically tailored to the users level, being quizzed only with the words they have learned in vocabulary, and only with the morphological concepts they have been introduced to. So, for example, let’s you are a student using the Basics of Biblical Hebrew by Pratico & Van Pelt. You have learned well the vocabulary introduced in chapters 3 through 10. Chapter 10 has introduced you to nouns in the construct state, so you want to focus on the construct forms of the nouns you have already learned in your vocabulary. In ParseHebrew, this is simple. Choose the vocabulary from chapters 3 through 10, then choose the grammar from just chapter 10. This is the beauty of ParseHebrew and its compatibility with intro grammars.

As you get further along into your studies, or perhaps as you wish to review, the app also has common sets to use. Potentially the most useful is the full paradigm of the strong verb. Most textbooks (with one or two notable exceptions) use the verb קטל “to kill” as the strong verb example. Now this verb is not actually used a lot in the Hebrew Bible, every single morphological form does not occur. But I’ve added the full paradigm into ParseHebrew. Let’s say, again, that you are that same student, and you’ve gotten to the end of chapter 23, which means you have now learned all of the Qal stem in all conjugations. You can in the app, go to the Strong Verb set. You can then use the further refinements built into the app to focus in on the Qal stem. As you learn more stems (Niphal, Hiphil, etc) you can drill yourself on different stems.

To see more details and images, see the webpage. You can also see a bit of a video walk-thru of the app here. And of course, I hope you buy the app and recommend it to others!

Happy studying!