Biblingo

"[The instructor was] very knowledgable, organised and thoughtful. Great sense of humour and humility, thanks very much."

"I thought the teacher and material were excellent.

"Fun, engaging, and helpful. Grateful for this Biblingo Live course."

"I thoroughly enjoyed this course and instructor."

Check out the next round of Biblingo Live classes (beginning the week of Sept. 28).

biblingo.com/live

Feeling familiar with something is not the same as actually knowing it.

When you cram, you might nail a quiz the next morning. But within a week, most of it is gone.

That’s not a personal failing, it’s just how memory works.

In 1885, Herman Ebbinghaus memorized hundreds of nonsense syllables to map how quickly we forget (1). The result: we lose most new information within days unless we revisit it. This became known as the forgetting curve.

Spaced repetition works by reviewing material just before you’re about to forget it. Each review resets the clock, and the gap between reviews gets longer each time.

In another study, researchers gave two groups of students a passage to read (2). One group crammed: they spent their time re-reading the passage over and over again in one sitting. The other group used spaced repetition: they read it once, then kept testing themselves on what they remembered over time. A week later, the spaced repetition group remembered four times more.

Here’s the surprising part: the re-reading group actually felt more confident going into the final test. They thought they knew the material better. They didn’t. Feeling familiar with something is not the same as actually knowing it.

Think about how children learn to talk. They don’t hear a word once and remember it. They hear “mama” and “milk” hundreds of times, spread across days and weeks, before it sticks. That’s spaced repetition in its most natural form.

And that’s exactly what Biblingo is built on. Just like babies learn language by taking in the world around them - seeing, hearing, and speaking - Biblingo immerses learners in Biblical Hebrew, Koine Greek, and Latin from the very start. As they learn, they’re constantly revisiting vocabulary and grammar they’ve already seen, combining them in new ways, in new contexts. They will be building a living memory of the language.

That’s immersion. That’s spaced repetition. That’s Biblingo.

(1) Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Über das Gedächtnis. Duncker & Humblot.

(2) Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J.D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255.

Ready to get serious about learning Hebrew or Greek?

Our live courses are designed to make your learning as fast and efficient as possible.

Take the plunge: biblingo.com/live.

Would you like to fast-track your way to reading the Bible in its original languages? That's what our online courses are designed to do: supercharge your learning process.

At the end of three 8-week classes, you will be able to read and understand parts of John 6 or Genesis 1 without a dictionary and with a fair degree of fluency!

Check out the courses here: biblingo.com/live.

Here's what some of the students have said:

"[The instructor was] very knowledgable, organised and thoughtful. Great sense of humour and humility, thanks very much."

"I thought the teacher and material were excellent."

"Fun, engaging, and helpful. Grateful for this Biblingo Live course."

"I thoroughly enjoyed this course and instructor."

If you are a Biblingo All-Access member, you get a 20% discount on all live courses.

Ready to get serious about learning Hebrew or Greek? Take the plunge: biblingo.com/live.

"Stop encouraging people to learn the biblical languages! We don't need to read the Bible in its original languages because of the Reformation."

We've heard this objection a few times.

The premise seems to be that the medieval Church prevented people from having the Bible in their native language. The Reformation changed that, and now we have no need to learn a foreign tongue to read the Bible.

There is some truth in this line of thinking, but the inference - "THEREFORE, we don't need to learn the biblical languages" - is actually pretty ironic when you get into the history.

First, vernacular Bible translations did exist under medieval Catholicism. The Church did not make a unified attempt to keep the people from having the Bible in their native tongue, though stiff opposition did sprout up in various jurisdictions of the Church. But - and this is key - the translations that were done tended to be from the Latin Vulgate to the vernacular, not from the original Greek and Hebrew. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the Western Church relied largely on the Latin Vulgate and de-emphasized the original languages.

When the Reformers came along, they echoed the motto of the Renaissance humanists: "ad fontes" (Back to the Sources). To take one example, Luther said: "...it is a sin and shame not to know our own book nor to understand our God’s speech and words, it is a still greater sin and loss if we do not study the languages, the more that God is now offering and giving us men and books and every aid and inducement to this study, and desires His Bible to be an open book."

So one aspect of the Reformation project was a re-centering of the original languages of Scripture. Luther and Zwingli and Tyndale all emphasized the biblical languages and wanted everyday believers to have access to good translations from the Greek and Hebrew. The fruit of this re-focusing on the original languages has been immense - and the need continues today.

Many mother-tongue Bible translators don't have access to good tools for learning the languages (see biblingo.com/about for more on how we are helping to solve this problem). Seminary students often struggle to reach reading fluency. And pastors often don't continue consistently using the languages past seminary.

But what about regular Christians? Why learn the languages when we have a wealth of good English Bible translations?

Answer: for the same reason you might travel the world to see a mountain or a masterpiece - instead of just looking it up on Google.

The Reformation + Gutenberg helped make the Bible widely available in everyday language. This is wonderful. But the printing press didn't diminish the original text of Scripture any more than the World Wide Web diminished the Mona Lisa.

We live in a time where the Bible has never been more accessible. But what if the next step was to make it accessible in its original languages? What if Tyndale's plowboy could not only read the Bible in his language, but also experience it in all its original beauty?

That's our mission: God's Word as it was originally written - for everyone.

If you want to dive deeper into the history of Bible translation, check out Peter Gurry & John Meade's excellent introduction to the history of the Bible, "Scribes and Scripture."

And if you want to dig into the nuances of modern Bible translation, listen to our podcast series on NT Bible translation where we interview translators from a variety of perspectives (including Douglas Moo, Lynn Cohick, William Varner, Scott McKnight, and William Pym): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqwx9sF2UfQ&list=PL4qBmdGMhDaFdzk1iA8jcBIdV98Dy08NG

About — Biblingo Biblingo's mission is to advance God's Word in the world by making the biblical languages accessible to everyone. Meet the scholars and team behind the app.

Introducing Friends & Classes on Biblingo!

Learners: Follow friends and share progress to keep each other motivated.

Families: See the progress of each member in your family.

Teachers: Create a class, add students by email, and track everyone's progress at a glance.

Access these features by clicking your profile icon in the app, then "Friends & Classes."