Learn Hebrew Today: Alef-Bet for Adults

I absolutely loved this book and it was perfect for me. I just want to add one thing. Know what TYPE of learner you are. Do you tend to remember things best when you HEAR them or when you READ them (or, perhaps, a combination)? I ask because most of us tend to be learn better one way or the other.For those who learn from looking at words on a page, going over thing, taking time to read about the sounds and letter combinations, this book is among the best out there. For other people, I would recommend the audio version of this book. It comes in both forms. Or you could use BOTH to compliment each other.In any case, if you buy this book, you'll find it carefully takes you through each step of learning basic Hebrew, the Alef-bet (alphabet, the ABCs) of the sounds and combinations. Before long, you'll have the thrill of sitting in temple and being able to read along with the Hebrew portions!Also, consider looking at the selections below for comparison and to find what is right for YOU: The First Hebrew Primer: The Adult Beginner's Path to Biblical Hebrew, Third Edition Hebrew in 10 Minutes a Day To Pray As a Jew: A Guide to the Prayer Book and the Synagogue Service Hebrew for Dummies Munich (Widescreen Edition) Rough Guide to the Music of Israel

Arrived safely & quickly. Great condition for its purpose

I have been teaching adults and older children to read Hebrew for years and this is the only primer I ever use.Reasons I love it:Learners feel immediate success at being able to read words they already know.Hard concepts and letters such as "sh'va, alef, shuruk and final chaf" are introduced quite early, giving the learner time to integrate these concepts as they go.The exercises use all possible combinations of letters and vowels already learned and real words are slowly introduced as the learner learns enough letters.Review pages punctuate new letter learning along the way to give the learner more time to integrate new material.Letter and vowel charts at the end give the whole picture.What's missing? A sense of the aleph bet in its proper order. For that I add aleph bet songs and ipad apps.Highly recommended for guided adult learning.

This book will teach you to read Hebrew. I bought this book as my first step in learning Hebrew so that I can read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew. After reading this book, I feel confident in my ability to read Hebrew words, and feel ready to begin my study of vocabulary and grammar. This book is absolutely amazing. The author uses repetition, and builds on what you have learned each lesson, so that by the time you reach the 10th lesson, you have no problem remembering the previous 9. My only complaint about this book is the authors use of Jewish terms to define the sounds of characters. This is fine of course for the Jewish student, but as a non-Jew, not knowing how to pronounce the words he is using causes some minor problems. Aside from that, this book is absolutely perfect.

This book is a good straigtforward introduction to Hebrew phonetics. It systematically teaches the pronunciation of the whole aleph bet and vowel signs, and has reading exercises. My nine year old son wants to learn Hebrew. I bought this book and we went through it in less than a week. Now he can read Hebrew, so he can begin actually learning the language and reading for greater fluency. But he has all the building blocks. The book also contains some of the basic Jewish prayers so one can at least follow and participate in a synogogue service or recite a blessing. I didn't expect this book to teach grammar or vocabulary or culture or history, just to get the foreign letters down. And it does that admirably.

This book is far too easy for adults. The average adult can learn a new alphabet in one night, so it is not necessary to spend weeks going through the pronunciation of the letters. In every language I have studied which did not use a roman alphabet (and I have learned 10 languages), the first day of class we took a quiz over the alphabet.Furthermore, most of the practice 'words' in this book are just nonsense syllables to allow people to practice reading the letters. It could at least have used real words throughout the book and defined them, allowing students to build vocabulary skills. Choose a better textbook for your students so that they can actually learn some Hebrew.Finally, the book informs readers (correctly) that the divine name YHWH (when written in Hebrew characters) makes whatever it is written on holy, but it still writes the word in the book. That means you can't even throw this book away - it needs a geniza.

This is a great way to learn how to read Hebrew. I am in the process of converting to Judaism and of course I need to know how to read Hebrew. This book is great. The letters and nice and big and so are the nikodot (vowels). It uses a combination of small Hebrew words as well as the prayers found in the siddur (prayer book). I really wish though it made note of the Ashkenazi way of pronouncing the letter Tav with a Dagesh (dot) as a "S". There is no real substitute for working with a person who can read Hebrew so they can correct mistakes before they become an issue. This is a great tool to help with learning. I suggest it highly!

Not the best study guide. Not the worse either. Without someone to pronounce the words and sound out the words phonetically, it's difficult to gain a complete understanding of how the language is spoken.

First of All, I want to give a complete objective review of this book after I finished reading it:1) Concerning the book itself, it is new, well written and in very good condition, no problem with delivery with amazon (good job).2) It is beginner READING book "only" and in the same time it is a religious book. It aims to teach you to read the common prayers and blessings in Hebrew. This book may need a teacher (it is designed that way) but you can work on your own as I did. I am learning Hebrew without a teacher.3) Sadly no audio is available (actually it is a book from around 1992) - I will tell you later how you can listen to pronunciation etc...4) This book is Awesome, brilliant in every possible way!!! A big thank you to the author and to the editor.5) It is a book that is totally vowelized (meaning written with vowels (the dots and dashes above and below the letters). It explains the letters and vowels and give tons of reading material to practice.Important advice - if you are learning Hebrew at a Beginner levela) Don't buy any book that claims that in majority of newspapers, books, TV shows people don't use vowels in Hebrew (all this is nonsense). IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO LEARN ANY SEMETIC LANGUAGES (ARABIC, HEBREW, ARAMAIC, SYRIAC etc...) WITHOUT "VOWELIZING THE LETTERS” (in bold), I repeat without VOWELS, without the HatNoat in Hebrew (Shva, Segol, patakh, Kamats, Shuruk etc...) or Harakat in Arabic etc.... Any book that claims otherwise must be thrown in the garbage. I remember when I learned Arabic, this is how I learn it -WITH WOWELS-. Arabic in newspapers, TV shows etc… is not vowelized like Hebrew, like Syriac.... To read without vowels is a stage of being intermediate or advanced learners not in the beginning.b) Audio is very important. Practice reading and practice correct pronunciation before knowing grammar and vocabulary. I don't like the Assimil method. I used also the Colloquial Hebrew (to know how to pronounce in the beginning) and then moved to Aleph isn't tough (very good book by Linda Motzkin) and to this one.As in all languages, Hebrew speakers are quite different. But you can classify accents in 4 main categories (not 2):1) Ashkenazim (Hebrew influenced by Germanic languages) - far from original ancient Hebrew2) Sephardim (Hebrew influenced by the Spanish peninsula languages) - accent far from original ancient Hebrew. Sephardi accent is the official most spoken accent. It is the accent of this book and majority of books that teaches Hebrew.Sephardic and Ashkenazi both speak modernized somewhat incorrect European influenced Hebrew. They could not pronounce Ain, Quf among many letters. - It is impossible for ancient Hebrew to have many similar pronunciation for different letters (no redundancy in Semitic Languages)3) Yemenite accent (my favourite) - Yemenite Jews4) + a lot of Jews from the Orient (Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Maghrib etc...) known as Mizrahi. (3) and (4) both are the most near to original ancient Hebrew. They pronounce "Khet" as the letter ' in Arabic (which is the most correct following the real origin). Letter Ain ' is pronounced similar to ' in Arabic (which is the most correct following the real origin). Same with Kuf ' (wrongly pronounced by European Hebrews) should be pronounced as ' in Arabic or as ' in Syriac Aramaic and many other letters, all of these letters really sounds like their sisters in Arabic and Aramaic. It is good to know that because there are many oriental dialects for Hebrew (which are more authentic to the original Hebrew – this is the opinion of academics in linguistics not me) as then to Sephardic (Spanish...) or Ashkenazi (German...).Proper Pronunciation of Hebrew Alphabet (near the forgotten original) links:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpIExmYVPSEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAx1rwU9x4Mhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqk83uZegoML7cEnXlXYZ4Ahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMowx4Q-eJAOf course all accents are understandable and acceptable and respectable but it is good to be familiar with all of the 4 so that you can understand when people are talking.To help you in learning the pronunciation (YouTube is a great tool)a) For me what I did is I went to YouTube and listened to prayers and blessings in Hebrew mentioned in the book. Watched many YouTube channels (try to watch channels pertaining to Synagogues and congregations not pertaining to some people that just learned the language). Few links that can help:From Brian Shamash channel found at: https://www.youtube.com/user/BrianShamash/videosAll prayers vowelized and chanted – Brilliant!. At least I knew how a very mysterious vowel is pronounced called "Shva". I almost gave up :-)Jewish Educator found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAw09v9JLPjjar5cYsPlGKgMany others are available - just type the name of the blessing or prayer in YouTube and you will get many videos.b) Sometimes Forvo.com might be useful - not always. If someone knows Hebrew and is reading this comment. Please go to Forvo and help in correcting and pronouncing more Hebrew words.c) Colloquial Hebrew (comes with 2 CDs of course buy the pack) and Assimil method pack come with 5 CDs of Audio!Unfortunately Google Translate don't have the Listen Feature like many common and non-common languages. I sent them already more than 100 email requesting that feature. Hebrew deserve also this feature. Please do this also. When they see many users demanding this they will be obliged to put someone (an authentic speaker) - I prefer from categories 3 and 4 above :-) to pronounce the words (something that don't require any budget nor hard effort).Missing points and minor remarks:1) The Shva vowel is a mysterious vowel. Watching ton of YouTube videos helps here precisely. Learn it well before you proceed. In the majority of case (95%), it is pronounced (I watched tons of videos) as short "eh" like the French e with an accent not as "ah" nor "oh" as some books claim when it comes in the beginning of a word and in other rare situations.. This books says it is pronounced always as a short "i" in previous situations- this is wrong! I wish I had a teacher to tell me that. It can be silent (like the "Soukoun" vowel in Arabic - if you are familiar with Arabic). Knowing Arabic or Syriac Aramaic is very advantageous to learning Hebrew by the way (All these are after all sister languages).

It starts with the assumption of no prior knowledge of the language, which is great for many but a tad tedious if you’re using it in a group of beginners and you can already read fairly fluently.

This book will teach you to read biblical and liturgy Hebrew. It won't teach you to speak Hebrew, or understand all of Hebraic liturgy.HOWEVER, for reading biblical Hebrew, this book is amazing! If you want to learn how to read a Hebrew Siddur, or Tanakh, then this is perfect.

It will help you learn the Hebrew alphabet, write the letters and say the letter names correctly.The book uses the various Hebrew blessings and other readings as examples of written Hebrew text, e.g., the four questions from the passover Haggadah, and if you don't know these orally in Hebrew (as I don't), you are at a disadvantage.If you do know them orally, then the book will be even more useful to you.

This is useful to me as a beginner. It is helping me to read Hebrew, as it was tricky without a beginners item like this and no class to go to.