Hebrew Hieroglyphics

Abstract

This article presents a walk-through of sample mini-lessons in an innovative method for teaching foreign language, along with brief remarks on its success in trial runs. The main innovation of the method is its use of reading as a starting point. The mini-lessons cover four stages: a pure hieroglyphic stage, a linearized hieroglyphical stage, a key-letter stage, and a phonetic stage. The method is directly applicable to language with different writing systems, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, or Chinese. But it also has radical implications for the teaching of foreign languages generally, since the sequencing of stages precisely reverses the accepted curricular ordering not only in all of these languages, but also in European languages and in English as a second language.