Biblical Hebrew Vocab (Oak Hill College)

A Biblical Hebrew Vocab File in Unicode & Pictures

This deck contains the 1200 most common words in the Hebrew Old Testament (plus a few other important ones). The Hebrew is included as Unicode text and pictures, which makes it portable to virtually any platform, including AnkiDroid on Android. The deck has been optimised for Anki 2.

Using the Deck

As the vocab in this deck is tagged with reference to several different Hebrew text books and as many of these overlap, it is not (currently) possible to divide the material into sub-decks according to the text books chapters. If you would like to learn the vocab in the order presented in one of those text books, it is best to proceed as follows:

1. No new cards in main deck: Make sure that the settings of the main deck "Biblical Hebrew Vocab (Oak Hill College)" are set to "0 new cards per day" and to as many "review cards per day" as you would like, e.g. 50.
2. Create a filtered deck to learn new cards from your current chapter: The easiest way to create a filtered (or dynamic) deck is to open the main deck and choose "Custom Study" and then "Limit to a particular tag" as that provides a dialog to choose the required tag(s). This will create a deck called "Custom Study Session", which you should then rename to make it permanent. Click on its options to change the search string to only include new cards. It should then look something like this:
   deck:"Biblical Hebrew Vocab (Oak Hill College)" is:new tag:'Kelley_13'
   You can now use this filtered deck to learn cards from only this chapter until they become review cards and then switch to the main deck to review anything you've learned anytime before.
3. Possible pitfall: Make sure that review-cards are not turned back into new cards. This can happen for leeches, depending on the "lapses" settings, or when a dynamic deck is emptied/deleted while some of the cards are still in the learning phase. The safest way to avoid cards getting lost is to add rather than replace the chapter numbers in the filtered deck, e.g.:
   deck:"Biblical Hebrew Vocab (Oak Hill College)" is:new (tag:'Kelley_01' or tag:'Kelley_02' or tag:'Kelley_03' or tag:'Kelley_04')

The current version of AnkiDroid on Android does not yet display Hebrew Unicode correctly due to Android limitations, which is the main reason for using picture files for the questions. Try "Fix for Hebrew Vowels" in "Preferences|Languages" to see whether that improces the display for the Hebrew outside the question field.

Deck Content

The deck contains the following fields:

1. Number - a consecutive card number; the order of cards is based on the chapters in Mitchel, which follow frequencies
2. Hebrew - in Unicode
3. Hebrew (unpointed) - an unpointed version of field 2, if you would like to be able to recognise unpointed words
4. English - an attempted synthesis of the main glosses from several books and lexicons (Kelley, Watts, Mitchel; HALOT, BDB)
5. Info - further details on the word or word form (e.g. binyanim or stem, if not obvious)
6. Related Words - the main words in this deck related to the current word; any words appearing later in this deck (according to card numbers) are marked with an asterisk;any words not contained in the deck are marked with two asterisks
7. Notes - this is mainly meant as a help for memorisation; it contains my personal mnemonics, which definitely need to be adapted to your needs!
8. Notes (German) - the same in German! By default, this field should be hidden on the card layout but if you understand German, feel free to remove "display: hidden;" from the css class "notes_german".
9. Type - part of speech
10. Gender/Number - the gender for nouns (if they are feminine or if their gender is suprising) and the gender & number for personal pronouns and numerals
11. Kelley - Chapter in P. H. Kelley, "Biblical Hebrew" (all vocab should be included)
12. Mitchel - Chapter in L. A. Mitchel, "A Student's Vocabulary for Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic" (all vocab up to 5.L should be included; this is the main chapter division)
13. Watts - Section in J. D. W. Watts, "List of words occuring frequently in the Hebrew Bible" (tagged up to section "verbs.263-275")
14. PVP - Chapter in G. D. Pratico & M. V. Van Pelt, "Basics of Biblical Hebrew Grammar" (all vocab should be included)
15. Frequency - frequency of all hononyms & stems according to BibleWorks
16. Media 1 - contains a picture of the Hebrew word(s)

The tags combine some of this information in order to allow easy filtering. The tag "pass_Deut5-6" was added to words occurring in Deuteronomy 5-6.

Card Layout

The default card layout is called "HebrewVocabCard" and looks as follows:

Front side:
"Media 1" [picture of the Hebrew word(s)]

Back side:
"English" ("Gender/Number")
"Info"; "Related Words" [in green]
"Notes" [in blue]

There are a lot of details on the cards, especially if there are several related words. But all this is just for reference to guide your memory. The only things you are testing yourself on is the field "English" and possibly the field "Gender/Number" (in black). Feel free to edit the layout to display fewer or different fields. You might, for example, want to use Unicode ("Hebrew") instead of the pictures ("Media 1") on the front side.

Credits

Special thanks go to Steffen Jenkins and our former lecturer James Robson, whose vocab files and lists provided the starting point for this project. This deck includes the freely available font Ezra SIL.

Have fun learning & reading Biblical Hebrew! SDG!
Oak Hill College, London, Dec 2012