An Introduction to Biblical Aramaic

Does the job, but it’s quite a slog to get through. I would have preferred for it to have included some exercises in translating into Biblical Aramaic, to really fix it in my mind, but that’s just me. I’m now trying to tackle the Aramaic part of the Book of Daniel, one verse at a time. It's going to be slow going!If you didn't already know Biblical Hebrew, it would have been even harder, though it does try to explain things from scratch, starting with the alphabet.It's a bit weird learning a language with such a small corpus, essentially just a few chapters of the Bible, and a few other things they have found, some of which is included at the end of the book. It means there are a lot of gaps in the grammar, because not all forms are attested. Yes, there's lot's of other Aramaic literature, but that's all later dialects. That's not the fault of the author of the book, though.

I bought this hoping to have some insight into Aramaic. I have been brought up speaking, reading and writing Hebrew, but since most of the prophet Daniel is written in Aramaic, I was hoping this would start me on the right track. I couldn't even open it properly on the kindle. It gets stuck on a page which is then hard to close. And unless you shut the computer down and reboot it won't disappear even if you close and open the kindle.I use the kindle alot but I have never encountered this before. From what I have been able to glean there doesn't seem to be much of a structure. I was thinking of returning it or asking for a refund... but time has passed and I accept it.

Very good! Easy to understand and follow.

Aramaic/Hebrew too small to read on Kindle.

I found the grammatical part of this text extremely helpful and understandable. The only thing that I would constructively criticize is the chapter containing the paradigms. I think that they are not sufficiently detailed for the first time student. My view is that a full paradigm of each variant verb (i.e. regular verb, I irregular, II irregular etc. III irregular, I Y H/W, etc.)in each declension would have been more helpful. Overall, however, it is easy to learn Biblical Aramaic from the book.