Today Hebrew grammar is well understood and there are many books on it. Rashi, however, lived before the age of grammar books. A major Rashi method is therefore the teaching of basic grammar.

Many students belittle this aspect of Rashi. They erroneously think that because of modern methods we know more. However Rashi will frequently focus on rare grammatical points not covered in conventional textbooks.

There are many classical aspects to grammar whether in Hebrew or other languages. They include
• The rules for conjugating verbs. These rules govern how you differentiate person, plurality, tense, mode, gender, mood, and designation of the objects and indirect objects of the verb. For example how do you conjugate, in any language, I sang, we will sing, we wish to sing, she sang it.
• Rules of agreement. For example agreement of subject and verb, of noun and adjective; whether agreement in gender or plurality.
• Rules of Pronoun reference.
• Rules of word sequence. This is a beautiful topic which is not always covered in classical grammatical textbooks.

Today we deal with the transformation of nouns into verbs. Although most conjugation rules refer to the conjugation of verbs, there are also conjugation rules for transfroming nouns into verbs. We list several common methods for transforming nouns into verbs:
• create the noun: e.g. to flower
• remove the noun: e.g. to dust
• use the noun: e.g. to hammer
• the verb(activity) done to this noun: e.g. Dt21-04b: neck the calf in other words kill it with a blow to the neck

Applying this rule to verse Nu04-13b we obtain the translation ...and they shall ash the altar.... meaning they shall remove ashes from the altar. Here, the Hebrew coined verb to ash is similar in meaning to the English to dust, that is to remove dust, the verb to dust being derived from the word dust.