I've run into a disturbing number of typos in the Basics of Biblical Hebrew Workbook. I've been reporting many of them as I go along, but it's reaching the point where it's affecting the usability of the resource. They are a particular problem in this book, because they show up in exercises for students (like me). In that setting, users are far less likely to be able to immediately recognize that something is a typo, and simply assume that they don't understand what's written. To be blunt, I am not the person you want editing your Hebrew text.
What prompted me to post something this evening was the "parsing" section at the beginning of chapter 25a. The first three words were listed as:
1. נִשְׁמַצ
2. נִשָּׁמַצ
3. נִשְׁמְצוּ
They should have been (and are correctly shown as in the answer key):
1. נִשְׁמַע
2. נִשָּׁמַע
3. נִשְׁמְעוּ
Replacing an ayin with a tsade is a recurring problem with this resource, and it's the kind of thing that can drive a student who's unfamiliar with the words to begin with crazy. The same problem happened again with number 13 out of this short set of 20 words.
This looks like an OCR error, but this is the workbook for a relatively new grammar - I would have thought that a fully-proofed electronic version would have been available from the publisher.
I apologize if I'm coming across as a bit surly; I'm just feeling frustrated. Simply glancing forward to the next section, which is sentences to translate, I'm seeing:
1. שִׁירֵי שִׂמְחָה בָּאָ֫רֶץ יִשָּֽׁמְצוּ
2. שִׁירֵי שִׂמְחָה בָּאָ֫רֶץ נִשְׁמְצוּ
3. שִׁירֵי שִׂמְחָה בָּאָ֫רֶץ יִשְׁמְצוּ
4. שִׁיר שִׂמְחָה בָּאָ֫רֶץ נִשְׁמַצ
I'm just guessing, but I suspect those verbs are all forms of שָׁמַא and not שָׁמַצ. I just want to learn how to read Hebrew, not copy-edit it.
