Hebrew 101: Lesson 1

At the beginning, we're just going to do a lot of learning. Before you can understand the language structure, you need some groundwork. We'll start with learning Hebrew letters and vocalization marks (unlike English, those are not exactly letters). If you "can follow the prayer," as many people do, then you probably can skip this part.

Hebrew letters

• As you probably know, Hebrew writing goes right to left
• Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters.
• Vowels didn't exist in the ancient Hebrew / Phoenician script. The alphabet, however, couldn't evolve because "not a single letter in the Scripture could be either added or removed". Over time, vocalization marks (also called diacritics) came into existence, which are written above/below/inside the normal letters, thus avoiding any changes to the letters themselves. Torah (and other) scrolls are usually written without any diacritics; printed prayer books usually contain them. In books and newspapers printed in Israel, in 99% of the text vocalization marks are not used.
• Hebrew term for the vocalization marks is "nekudot" (literally "dots"), or "nikkud" (vocalization, literally "dotting").
• Correction to the above: Theoretically, most vowels do not "have their own letter"; but in real life, we don't write with diacritics either. When you write without diacritics, some minimal necessary subset of vowels is actually written with letters. We'll discuss this topic in detail later.

Let's start with the consonants existing in English also:

The lucky number 13 is probably enough for the first lesson. We also need to give some more details on the above.

• ל (Lamed) sounds softer than English "L", it's closer to L in languages like Spanish, French, German, or Arabic.
• ו (Vav) - used to be W ages ago; it's evolved into V, but for foreign words it's also used for W: וושינגטון (Washington), שווארמה (shawarma).

To start reading, you'll need at least some basic vocalization marks. Here are some of them:

Again, it looks like some explanations are needed right away.

First, why do we need two E's and two A's?

In ancient times (around the 6th-10th centuries CE, when the vocalization scheme was developed), the A's and E's differed by their length. Kamatz and Tzeire stood for longer vowels, Patach and Segol were short ones.

Vowel length

• The only long vowel which can differ from its short counterpart is Tzeire - some Israelis would pronounce it "Yiddish way", like a diphthong EY.
• Besides long and short vowels, there are reduced or ultra-short vowels. They are always stressless, rather variations of a zero-vowel, second-class citizens among the vowels. In most cases though, their "reduction" is as theoretical as the length of other vowels.

Vocabulary

To apply what we've just learned, let's try to read a couple of words. For now, just memorize the words, and in a few lessons I'll try to make the learning process somewhat more entertaining.