Thursday, February 08, 2007

A Great Resource For Learning Chumash

Excerpt from Rabbi Yakov Horowitz's article Training Wheels:

Take the limud of chumash, for example. More than ninety percent of all words that appear in chumash are variations of only 270 root words! (Click here for a listing of the most commonly used words). There are 26 verbs (ex. yatza, holach) and 38 nouns (ex. lechem, makom) that appear in chumash more than 500 times each**! If we were to give children a rudimentary understanding of lashon hakodesh – teach them the shoroshim and shimushim (‘root words’, prefix, suffix, etc.) – before or as soon as they start learning chumash, we would be providing them with the chinuch ‘training wheels’ they need to succeed.

3 Comments:

At February 8, 2007 at 10:24:00 AM EST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is there such a thing for gemmara?

 
At February 8, 2007 at 12:52:00 PM EST, Blogger A Simple Jew said...

Not to my knowledge.

 
At February 8, 2007 at 4:21:00 PM EST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Rabbi Aryeh Carmel's z"l guide to Talmud study has a much shorter list of key terms.

 

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