David Reimer is one of three filling in for Justin Taylor this week, and I have found him to be an invariably stimulating person. Linking to another article, he had this to say about the learning of the biblical languages:
Meanwhile, one of my jobs as a teacher of biblical languages is to get the inevitable rote-learning to go down deep, so that the Hebrew (or Greek, or Aramaic) becomes a language, and not just an obscure code for what we already knew the text meant from our favourite translation.
Amen. Read the post and the post to which he links.