| Bob...
For me, it is just neat to see it all come together and know that the translations we have are either faithful, or took a bit of liberty.
I am in an inductive study of Hebrew which means that it does not start out with learning paradigms and vocabulary, parsing and such. But, it starts out like we all learned English. We put words together, learned the alphabet, learned to spell and so on. I think it is a good approach, although, it can overwhelm you since we learned English over the period of 10 years, and I only have 3 or 4 semesters to learn Hebrew.
The inductive study is not good for those who want to know the rules of language because you only get the rules in bits and pieces.
But the greatest thing about inductive is that we are starting in Genesis Chapter 22, with the actual text and reading it letter for letter, learning as we go, the meaning of the words.
If you have a MKJV (if you don't, go to biblegateway.com), look up Genesis 22 and just start reading. From what I have seen so far, it is a word for word translation and is closest. The only problem with it is that it is clumsy in English, which is why the NKJV is a bit easier to read because they have made it a bit more graceful.
All in all, it is very satisfying. It is difficult because we already know English backward and forward. We seem to think that learning Hebrew or Greek should be that simple and it isn't. It takes patience and hard work. And that, I believe, is why it is satisfying.
As a note on Latin, I teach my boys Latina Christiana and they are in their second year. As an exercise the other evening, I printed out John 1:1-3 from the Vulgate and we translated it. That was fun. Their eyes lit up as we went through the words that became familiar after we put it all together, because they have heard John 1:1-3 in English a few times. It is almost like putting a puzzle together. Good stuff.
In Christ,
KC
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