Study

A student asked me to put up some "study aids" for the upcoming Hebrew midterm.

Here are a few, "off the top of my head" thoughts about parsing and taking the test.

Dr. Staats has been so gracious to allow the use of two different color pens so that you can do part of the exam from memory and part with tools. My thinking is you cannot do yourself any harm by trying to do what you can from memory first, and then filling in what you need tools for with another color pen. Just leave yourself room on the paper for what you think you will need to add. Do all you can from memory first. You can do more than you now think you can.

Simple things you could get:

וַיֹּאמֶר אֳלֹהִים

This is a Qal imperfect 3ms (note the י prefix after the ו) with a vav conversive from the root אָמַר (he said) so the imperfect "he will say" is turned over by the vav conversive making it "and he said" --- What follows then is the masculine plural noun which means "God," so a literal, wooden translation would be "And he said God" with God being the speaker. In English we put the noun first so a smooth English translation would be "And God said"

This appears multiple times. Put this parsing in your mind and you will get it right each time it comes up in the text.

וַיּ appears in front of other verbs also multiple times in the text for the exam.

Whenever you see it you know it is a Qal imperfect 3m with a vav conversive.
This form will appear with "he said," "he called," "he saw."

יְהִי this is a Qal imperfect/jussive 3ms from הָיָה (he/it was) "let there be"

I may add more if I can think of simple things, but working on your vowel patterns would be helpful. In the perfects you already know the vowel patterns as they are included in the name of the form (i/i for Hiphil, etc.) So just work on the imperfects.