Having called myself out, let's talk progress. Assume I'm doing it wrong; I had an ustādh[-a] for Arabic, which I don't have for Aramaic.
I acquired Larry Mitchel's Zondervan Student's Vocabulary at a used store awhile ago. It is mostly for Hebrew. However. The "Late Biblical" Hebrew, and several of the later prophets, had come fresh off the Babylonian exile. Some of these guys (2 Isaiah often cited) may well have spoken Imperial Aramaic as a first-language. Accordingly Mitchel devoted a section for the kind of Aramaic you'll be seeing in Ezra and in canon-Daniel.
It gets better: Mitchel organises the words by frequency. This means, if you memorise the more-common words, you can get started on translating a lot of this up-front, leaving the "hapax" stuff for the dictionary.
One clear problem with this approach: I am not learning Syriac. Syriac came off Edessa in the Assyrian Emperor's milieu of the northern Mesopotamía. This would be "EA" for David Taylor. Mitchel is relaying words from the Biblical dialect - "BA". This looks to be a Babylonian-Canaanite hybrid, unbespoke in Edessa and, very-likely, by anybody anywhere else (although some might say the same for M.S. Arabic). I certainly see some Babylonianisms in here like "gabbar" for a tyrant which cannot be anything but a calque of Sumeria's LU.GAL.
What I think I will get, is a basis on the boring stuff, most of the vocabulary I'll expect when I do learn Syriac in earnest. And to speed-read at least one Aramaic script, the same one the Jews use. Although I get the feeling the Syriac scripts came from the Assyrian Empire's.
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