For a modern language, the inductive method works wonderfully well. At UCLA the courses I had in French, German and Modern Hebrew were all done by the modern inductive method. But for dead languages, at least for me, I didn’t appreciate it. I took several years of Akkadian at UCLA from Georgio Buccellati and his courses were mostly inductive; he commented once that it was “instruction by frustration” which captures well my experience in those classes. Sumerian, thankfully, was more old school and systematic in the approach, with a different professor.
Thus, now when I teach biblical Hebrew, I do it the old fashioned, systematic and very structured way—the same way I learned ancient Greek at UCLA. First I teach the alphabet, then the vowels, the other markers like the daggesh, before moving on to nouns—two genders, and the verbs, perfect and imperfect, first in Qal and then moving to the other stems. Slowly, carefully, step by step. It may not be the “natural” way to learn a language, like the way we learned our first language as infants and toddlers, but I find for dead languages it usually works better. The current textbook, which I’ve been using for awhile, since first finding it at a Society of Biblical Literature meeting, is The First Hebrew Primer, Third Edition, by Ethelyn Simon, Irene Resnikoff, and Linda Motzkin. It’s published by EKS Publishing Co. in Oakland, California. The students seem to like using it nearly as much as I do.