3ET: First Example (Hebrew)

In this example you will get acquainted with the basic functions of 3ET. We shall try an example of an exercise in identifying the grammatical gender of Hebrew words. This exercise assumes that you have installed 3ET with the WIVU edition of either Genesis 1-3 or the entire Old Testament.

Start the program by double-clicking on the 3ET icon on your desktop. Shortly after, you will see this window:

3ET comes with a few exercise examples. You must copy these to a folder where it is easy for you to retrieve them. This can be done in thus:

Select the menu item File > Copy sample exercises; this will cause a file selection window to appear. Choose the location where you want the exercise samples to be stored. The easiest way to do this is simply to press the button “Open”, then the samples will be stored under your normal Documents folder. The system will create a folder named 3ET in your Documents folder, and this is where the exercise samples will be stored.

Select the menu item File > Load exercise. When the file selection window appears, find the folder 3ET\WIVU or 3ET\WIVU_Gen_1-3 in your Documents folder and open the file gender.3et.

The program now shows five tabs, which we will study more closely later:

You have now loaded an exercise. Under the tab “Description”, which is currently shown, you can see that we are going to work with the Hebrew Old Testament and that the exercise is about “Which gender is this?”, that is, identifying grammatical gender. (You need not worry about the word “Advanced”, which is only relevant when you want to create an exercise yourself.)

Select the menu item Run > Continuous. The program will then show you the first question. The program chooses a random verse from the Pentateuch and asks you to identify the gender of nouns and pronouns in the sentence. It may, for example, look like this:

(If the text looks ugly, you can change the font under Program Preferences.)

If you click on the “Locate” button, the program will inform you that the text is taken from Genesis 1:14.

In this example the program has identified two nouns, מְאֹרֹת֙ and שָּׁמַ֔יִם, which are written in red letters. Your task is to identify the gender of these two words. Under “Gender” you can indicate your choice; for example, like this:

Now click “Check answer”:

Here, 3ET tells you that מְאֹרֹת֙ is not masculine; but שָּׁמַ֔יִם is correctly given as masculine.

You can try to correct the erroneous answer, or you can click “Show answer”, and the program will tell you that מְאֹרֹת֙ is feminine:

If you click “Next question” in the lower right corner, the program will give you another random sentence to analyse.

Click “Finish” in the lower right corner to end the questions and return to the five tabs:

We shall now take a closer look at what these tabs contain. The exercise was opened using the File > Load exercise menu item. This means that you cannot modify the exercise. In this case the tabs will only show what the exercise contains. They merely provide information. (If instead you had opened the exercise using File > Edit exercise, you would have been able to modify the exercise.)

Before we proceed, we need to discuss two important concepts used by 3ET:

Sentence units: A sentence can be seen as consisting of a set of sentence units. By far the most common thing is to see a sentence as a set of words, but you could also see the sentence as comprised of clauses or phrases. Thus a sentence unit can be a word, a clause, a phrase or perhaps something else. As you read on, you will rarely go wrong if you assume that “sentence unit” means “word”.
Features: A sentence unit has various features. A feature has a name and a value. For example, a word can have a feature called part of speech with the value noun and a feature called gender with the value masculine. An important feature is called text, which simply refers to the actual characters making up the word; for example, the text feature may have the value “elephant”.

To make things easier to understand, we will postpone a description of the “Universe” tab for later and instead take a look at the following tabs. Click on the “Sentences” tab; this will bring up this window:

This tab tells you how 3ET chooses the sentences used in the exercises. The program chooses the sentences based on certain criteria, which are shown here. The program chooses a sentence by looking for certain sentence units with specific features. In this example the sentence unit is a word, the part of speech feature must belong to the set { Noun, Pronoun }, and the feature Gender must not belong to the set { None, Unknown }. In other words: 3ET will look for sentences containing words that are nouns or pronouns and whose gender is known.

Things get a bit more complicated now: When the program is running, it actually has to make two choices: First it must choose some interesting sentences; thereafter it must choose some interesting sentence units within the chosen sentences. Let us briefly return to the sample question above:

As the program made its first choice, it found the sentence יְהִ֤י מְאֹרֹת֙ בִּרְקִ֣יעַ הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם לְהַבְדִּ֕יל בֵּ֥ין הַיֹּ֖ום וּבֵ֣ין הַלָּ֑יְלָה. The program’s second choice resulted in the words (sentence units) מְאֹרֹת֙ and שָּׁמַ֔יִם. These are the words that the user will be asked about.

The “Sentences” tab shows the criteria used by the program when it chooses sentences. The next tab, “Sentence Units” indicates the criteria used by the program when it chooses sentence units within the sentence. Very often the same criteria will be used for choosing sentences and sentence units. In that case the “Sentences” tab will display the text “Use this for sentence unit selection”, and the “Sentence Unit” tab will be inactive.

So in this example, the program chooses sentences based on the criterion “sentences must contain words that are nouns or pronouns whose gender is known”. The program chooses sentence units based on the same criterion: The sentence units are words that are nouns or pronouns whose gender is known. In the next example we shall see a case where the two criteria are different.

The last tab is called “Features”:

This tab says that when the exercise is running, 3ET will show the value of the text feature to the user and request the value of the gender feature. You will recall that that was exactly what we saw when the exercise was run. Under the exercise sentence the program showed this small table:

Now select the “Universe” tab:

In this tab you can specify the parts of the Bible that 3ET shall consider when looking for sentences for the exercise. Currently, the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) is marked (unless you use a database that only contains Genesis 1-3), but you can change this quite freely so that the sentences are taken from other parts of the Old Testament. By clicking the small + next to the names of the books of the Bible (or by double-clicking the name itself), you can choose to limit the universe to a few chapters or verses.

This tab is different from the other ones (which is why we saved this for last). Where the other tabs merely give information about the exercise, you can actually modify the content of this tab. (But you cannot save your changes.) In this way a teacher can create a general exercise covering, for example, the entire Old Testament, and you as a student can limit the universe to the sections you are interested in.

Go to main page Updated: 2010-01-05 13:38:15