A Winding Path to Learning Hebrew

By Neal Walters

I first wanted to learn some introductory Hebrew for a tourist trip to Israel. The trip got postponed from 1990 to 1996 due to Desert Storm and the Gulf War. There weren’t many resources available in the late 1980s to a young man living in Oklahoma.

Via a language catalog (there was no internet then), I discovered the FSI courses. I had used FSI for Brazilian Portuguese, and thus ordered it for Hebrew. At least Portuguese used the same alphabet as English, but Hebrew required learning 22 new characters, and reading at first was very slow.

Although the FSI course came with about 24 tapes, I still have never completed it. The type-style is ugly, and the course was clearly not made for self-study, but instead was made to be taught in a classroom environment.

Back then, Borders was building it’s first huge book stores in large cities. On a business trip, I visited one, and found a small selection of Hebrew books not normally found in other bookstores. The book that helped me master the alphabet was a “reader” that was full of practice exercises of reading short two to four letter syllables or words.

Attending synagogue and learning some of the Hebrew prayers really accelerated my understanding of Hebrew. The music, along with the weekly repetition, clearly helps with the learning the words and phrases. Each week, I would pick a favorite tune, and go home and break down the words of that particular prayer.

I used Menahem Mansoor’s “Biblical Hebrew: Step by Step” to get an introduction to Biblical Hebrew. A few years later, a friend taught Biblical Hebrew to a small group using Jacob Weingreen’s “A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew”. This is a very serious book, which we finished a couple of years later, doing one lesson every week or two.

A full exposur to Hebrew requires at least some Modern (“Modernit”) and Biblical (“Tanachit”). Two modern Hebrew books from bookstores includes 3 or 4 cassette tapes: “Hugo Language Course: Hebrew in Three Months” and also Eliezar Tirkel’s “Every Hebrew”. Listening to audio in the car is one of my favorite ways to learn any language; the trick is that the lessons don’t get too complex too fast.

Eventually, in 2005, I took two semesters of “online” modern Hebrew from college in Boston. We used the “Hebrew From Scratch” textbook, and met online with our professor once per week. In 2008, via the same school, I took “Introduction to Talmud” and began learning my first Aramaic.

Unfortunately, I still can’t speak Hebrew as well as I would like. My journey is still continuing. By creating software, and teaching others, I continue to learn each and every day.

Who else wants to learn Hebrew the fast and easy way with the multimedia Hebrew courses created by Neal Walters? You can see video demos of his courses at http://HebrewResources.com.

Article kindly provided by UberArticles.com

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