My Hebrew Learning Experiences from AlefBet to Talmud
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. Eventually, on a business trip, I visited one of the Borders book stores, which were all huge and new at the time. I found a “reader”, a book that teaches the alphabet, and had lots of practice exercises, where the student tries to read pages and pages of syllables and words. I began learning more and more prayer book Hebrew by attending synagogue. Each week, certain tunes would stick in my mind, and I would go home and try to learn the words to go with the tune. Music and singing definitely helps with the memorization. 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. To really know Hebrew, one must study both Biblical and Modern. I remember using two short courses that were books that came with 3 or 4 cassette tapes: “Hugo Language Course: Hebrew in Three Months” and also Eliezar Tirkel’s “Every Hebrew”. I found that I liked the Hugo course slightly better, but learned something from each. 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. Neal Walters now creates more direct paths to learning Hebrew. You can learn Hebrew faster with his courses at http://HebrewResources.com. This article is available as a unique content article with free reprint rights.
