Hebrew 101

This section addresses those who are just starting to learn Hebrew from scratch. That is, from absolute zero.

Whatever your reasons for learning Hebrew might be, this page is for you if you don't know what "Aleph", "Patach", "Schwa", "Guttural" consonants mean, and what the difference is between Dagesh and Tzeirei.

If all this sounds like total gibberish, this section is for you! Hebrew letters will be explained, along with what vocalization is, why you need diacritic marks, how you write Hebrew, and so on.

Semitic languages in general and Hebrew in particular have one interesting feature: word structure. Understanding Hebrew word structure enables you to do a couple of things:

1. Makes it possible to accumulate Hebrew vocabulary faster
2. Makes it possible to understand words you haven't even heard or seen before
3. Makes it possible to even "invent" new words (but be careful with that one).

The same is possibly true for Romance or Germanic languages as well, but to a lesser extent.

Another remarkable thing about Hebrew is its ancient (3,000 years or so) writing system. Despite this ancient and slowly evolving writing system, on the one hand, and an unusual history of spoken language, on the other hand, written Hebrew doesn't always exactly reflect the modern pronunciation of spoken language.

In our lessons we will use either modern "Mixed" spelling, or classical vocalized spelling (one you can find, e.g. in Hebrew prayer books).

Hebrew 101 consists of 11 progressive lessons covering the fundamentals of reading and understanding Hebrew.