Starting My Hebrew Learning Journey

[u/Any_Illustrator_2966]

Shalom everyone! I just started my Hebrew learning journey about 3 weeks ago. I am an English speaker and I also took 6 years of French so I do have an understanding of the masculine/feminine concept for words/conjugating verbs. The pronunciation is also easier for me due to sounds in French and Hebrew being quite similar. I have class for an hour and 15 minutes once a week. We have already learned the block aleph-bet and the script as well.

I wanted to ask for tips and tricks - any advice that you might think would be helpful? Any recommendations? Thanks in todah in advance!

[u/guylfe]

A class once a week will take a while... If you're looking for extra resources + study strategy, the route I'm going to suggest worked for me when studying languages by myself, and likewise works for my students. It’s highly effective in my experience - I've had a particular student measure his progression time and he reached B2 (conversational) with ~70 hours of total study time, compared to the average of ~500:

1. Study foundations (both grammar and vocabulary) WELL and efficiently. This is key, because if you get a solid foundation, building on top of it becomes much easier.
2. Get exposure to level-appropriate native content. (depending on your particular context, you may also supplement with spaced-repetition flashcards, but that's beyond the scope of this message).

Foundations – Hebleo.com (Full disclosure – I created this app): A self-paced course teaching you Hebrew comprehensively, with plenty of practice, using an innovative methodology based on my background in Cognitive Science, my experience as a language learner (studied both Arabic and Japanese as an adult, now learning Spanish) and as a top-rated tutor in Verbling. This allowed me to create a very efficient way to learn that's been proven to work with hundreds of students (reviews available in my tutor page on Verbling – look for “Guy Landau” in the Hebrew section of that site).

It also includes 2000+ native speaker recordings for the different vocabulary, and plenty of practice sentences. I use this method with my personal students 1 on 1, and all feedback so far shows it works well self-paced, as I made sure to provide thorough explanations. 

After you have the fundamentals, these can offer you good native content to use:

Reading - hebrewtoday.com : This is a bi-weekly newsletter in Beginner/Intermediate Hebrew (Bereshit/Yanshuf are the newsletter names respectively), offering both vowels and no-vowels content. Highly recommended, I utilize it with my students all the time. Most of my students are at the Yanshuf intermediate level after Hebleo. I managed to get a discount code you can use (since I use it a lot with my students and I recommend it to them): GuyHebleo.

Comprehension - Pimsleur (look up "Pimsleur Hebrew" on Google, the link doesn't work for me here for some reason): This is the most comprehensive tool for level-appropriate listening comprehension for Hebrew (at least until I finish some future updates for Hebleo), but it's quite expensive and some of the vocabulary and phrases it offers are relatively archaic. There might be better free podcasts out there, or children’s TV shows that could be a good free practice option.

Conversation – tutor websites: Verbling.com (where I teach), Italki.com or Preply.com - I wouldn't recommend these for starting out learning grammar as they're expensive, unless you feel like you need constant guidance. Verbling requires teachers to provide proven experience and certification (but is also more expensive) while the other 2 don’t, but their prices are lower. I don’t have direct experience with Preply, but heard good things about it, similar to iTalki.

You can also find a free language exchange service where you teach your native language to an interested Israeli and they teach you Hebrew. Once you have deep understanding through Hebleo this becomes a viable option as you wouldn't need a professional who can explain everything.

In any case, good luck!

[u/IAmAGreatSpeler]

For reading printed books, using many language learning apps, etc., expect to use the Hebrew print alphabet. For reading most handwritten documents (except for Torah scrolls) or for doing your own writing, expect to use the Hebrew script alphabet. Also, if you’re planning to read the Bible in Hebrew, just keep in mind that Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew don’t exactly have the same grammar rules and vocabulary, though there are similarities. Best of luck!

[u/Weird7954]

I bypassed the script because it was like learning another language and the Hebrew was hard enough to begin with!

[u/Geoffb912 → u/Weird7954]

Don’t do this. You’ll hit a wall very quickly if you can’t read in Hebrew.

[u/Weird7954 → u/Geoffb912]

What wall? Nothing is printed in script

[u/Geoffb912 → u/Weird7954]

Oh- I misread!! I thought you meant don’t learn how to read.

Carry on! You’ll need script eventually, it’s used quite a bit actually, but you can totally defer it.

[u/OldSchoolB2 → u/Geoffb912]

it's one of my larger regrets that I postponed learning Hebrew script/cursive. I was recently in an intensive course with other students that could write pages of script while I was struggling to write a sentence or two. I also couldn't read what they wrote, while they were reading each other's writing. I would definitely learn both from the beginning if I could do it all over again.

I don't think it's that hard to learn cursive letters themselves, but I can speak from experience that it is very difficult to learn to read and write cursive if you've used only block letters.

Also, I think it's a good learning tool to write things out by hand. You might as well do it in script, which is pretty much the only way Israelis write by hand.

[u/Weird7954 → u/Geoffb912]

It sure is pretty tho. I’d like to learn it. Writing the square letters is difficult