Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Eight Steps for the Beginning Hebrew Student

By Neal Walters

Any student of Hebrew must begin his or her adventure by learning the letters and vowels. This includes being able to sound out, or pronounce written words. Most students begin with the "printed" or "book" style Hebrew, and learn cursive later. While most of Europe and the Americas uses the Latin alphabet, Hebrew is entirely different, consisting of 22 letters and vowels that are written as special symbols above and below the letters.

Believe it or not, students don't learn Hebrew for the same reasons, and you, too, should examine your goals. Is your goal to learn to read the Hebrew scriptures, or is it to talk to your cousin in Israel? Or maybe you are trying to learn to pray the traditional prayers in Hebrew.

It makes since to learn the most popular words first, doesn't it? If learning Biblical Hebrew, why not start with the most popular 400 words. We have put those words on audio-CDs, for learning at home or in your car, and we have also included the same words in our software program.

Let's compare Modern and Biblical Hebrew. The verb systems are very similar, but Hebrew tends use the perfect and imperfect (past and future) where as Modern Hebrew uses those and a lot of the present tense. Nouns are similar, but Biblical Hebrew might talk about chariots, kings, and prophets, modern Hebrew might talk about plains, trains, and automobiles.

Some students might get some words "mixed-up", because there are several letters in Hebrew that are silent. For example, the word "ET" could be AYIN-TAV (meaning "time"), ALEPH-TAV (pronounced: "AT" meaing "you feminine singular" or "ET the pointer to the direct object , or even ALEPH-TET (pronounced "ET" meaning "pen'). A good tutorial will point out these similarities and differences.

Learning numbers is another challenge. Hebrew has both masculine and feminine numbers, so the student must learn to count to 10 two different ways! A good way to enforce numbers is telling time, or doing simple math problems in Hebrew.

Children enjoy learning Hebrew through playing games. One of our games is memory-match, where the student turns over two "cards" at a time. If the numbers match, the cards disappear. Even adults love these types of games.

One other thing a student must consider learning is cursive letters. This is more common for the modern Hebrew student. Even after mastering the basic 22 letters of printed Hebrew, cursive Hebrew is almost like learning a second Hebrew alphabet. The student should, like a young child, practice writing the cursive letters over and over, usually on lined paper. - 16928

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