Which is easier to learn: Hebrew or Greek

I'll take the opposite position to my prior esteemed colleagues.

The Hebrew alphabet is undoubtedly harder to learn, especially given our familiarity with alphas and betas from mathematics etc. But, I found Hebrew to be a much simpler language grammatically.

I find reading Hebrew narrative easier than Greek narrative. Of course, Hebrew poetry is not at all easy but nor are some sections of Paul's letters.

In part, the answer will always come down to the amount of vocab that one learns. I was fortunate (! ?) enough to have to learn the top 1000 Hebrew words for an exam at the end of my second year of Hebrew. As a result, there are not too many words which I need to look up when reading the narrative sections of the OT.

Ron,

Which is easier? It depends on how your brain works, how good your teacher/book is, and how much effort you are willing to put into it. I know people on both sides of the question. Personally, I found Hebrew to be easier, but that's mostly from the lower expectations of my Hebrew teacher compared to my Greek prof. I remember a greater percentage of my Greek than my Hebrew. Since I took Hebrew after Greek I also benefited from understanding language better than when I started Greek.

So all of that to say I think Hebrew is a little easier, but don't take my word for it, you might be the exact opposite of me [:)].

Greek is easier. It has its own exceptions, but Hebrew is like english - exception to every rule, and exceptions to the exceptions. Lots of stuff to learn and remember. But in some ways this makes Hebrew more interesting.

I would say Hebrew is very difficult to begin with.  We were told it is a very regular language without many exceptions, and decades of reading the Bible partly in Hebrew have not led me to disagree with that.  The OT is full of puns which are not translatable, so in the original Hebrew I get much more out of reading the OT than in even the best translation.  I would not necessarily advise everyone to invest the time and energy to learn Hebrew, but if you have the chance and the time, go for it!  I imagine this new Logos software would be a big help.[:)]  

They're different. Greek is closer to English with its alphabet and cognates. There are vast amounts of paradigms and such to memorize, but conceptually the only really new things are cases and the idea of aspect. Hebrew, on the other hand, has less to memorize (imo), but is far more difficult conceptually because it's so different from English- aspect vs tense, tri-literal roots and the binyanim system, completely different syntax (much of what is communicated explicitly in English with helping verbs, modality, punctuation, adverbiality, etc. is communicated syntactically in Hebrew), for starters. 

That said, I much prefer Semitic languages

Also, can't resist posting this, since it reminds me so much of the language courses I've taken.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbI-fDzUJXI&feature=search

Ben said:

Also, can't resist posting this, since it reminds me so much of the language courses I've taken.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbI-fDzUJXI&feature=search

[8-|]  Thanks Ben.  ..... it highlights an important key to language learning..... Repetition, Repetition, Repetition!

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Let me offer a slightly different perspective:

I agree that Greek is easier than Hebrew, but am coming at the question from a different angle. I've taken Greek in seminary and found that the rote memorization
of vocab and paradigms was not one that worked well for me. I got an
A in the class, but did not like it. I'm fluent in German, so learning languages is not a problem for me, but that is not a good way for me to learn. Too much boring work for to little payoff. I was much more excited by the
idea of Logos and their "Learn to Use Biblical Greek and Hebrew"
DVD which proposes that with Logos software you can get much faster to the rewards of translation using the tools they have.

I wanted to test that out so I arranged to work with two 
professors at my seminary, one in Greek and one in Hebrew. For the
Greek I used Logos to translate the book of Romans from the Greek,
supplying with notes and commentary, and getting feedback from my
prof about things I missed. For the Hebrew I translated a selection
of Psalms using Logos, again supplying commentary and notes, and
getting feedback from my prof.

Greek is more complex than biblical Hebrew. It is clear from a
Greek sentence for example which words are nominative or accusative. This
is not true with Hebrew (or English) and on top of that Hebrew will
often times not even have the verb in a sentence. This made
translating the poetry of Psalms quite hard. Not that Romans is easy
to translate, but Greek is quite precise, and so you just need to
learn the complex rules. Logos has lots of tools to do that. For the
Hebrew I had to purchase extra books that were not included (the BDB
and TWOT) since the lexicons it comes with are substandard, and I also needed to refer to a selection of critical
commentaries (in addition to the NET, my favorites were Alter and
WBC). So one problem is that the tools in Logos for Hebrew are not
developed as well as they are for Greek. There is for example no
critical commentary for the OT (unless you want to shell out some big
$$), and there are a lot of errors in both the AFAT and BHS
that Logos has. This is not the case with Greek which vary rarely has errors in the Logos program, and comes with critical commentary and a nice set of lexicons.

Another thing that is particularly challenging about Hebrew is
that much of the time there seems to have been some corruption in the
text (that is, the text does not make any sense) so that scholars
will then propose a different word instead. If you look at the notes
for the NET you'll see they do this all the time. Lots of
times in order to do this you need to not only be fluent in Hebrew,
but also in Ugaritic, Syriac or some other ancient language. That
means that the tools of Logos can't really be applied for Hebrew in
the same way as they can for Greek since you can't really program a
software to free associate. That's why I needed to get those extra
commentaries in order to be aware of all the word substitutions (they
cal them emendations) scholars proposed, and then argue amongst
themselves about.

The moral of all this is that if you want to use Logos, then Greek
is much better suited than Hebrew is. I’d say that with some
training, you can use the software as a great tool to get some pretty
solid and deep insights into the NT. With Hebrew, I am much less
confident that this is possible to do, or at least that it has more
hurdles involved.