[Originally posted on 06/21/16 on the Duolingo Hebrew for English speakers forum by BartiBar]
Shalom! ~ !שלום
Welcome to the Hebrew for English speakers forum. After more than a year of hard work, we’ve finally made it. Everyone can now learn Hebrew on Duolingo!
In this post we provide you with things that can help you with learning Hebrew and some general information that you’d probably want to know. Please read on.
The differences between Modern and Biblical Hebrew
One of the common questions learners usually ask is:
“What is the difference between Modern and Biblical Hebrew?”
or:
“If I learn Modern Hebrew, will I be able to understand Biblical Hebrew? (and vice versa)”
The quick answer is: It depends. The truth is that even an average native Hebrew speaker has a hard time understanding Biblical Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew is different from Modern Hebrew in grammar, vocabulary and sentence structure.
The bottom line is that this course won’t make you a rabbi, but you’ll definitely be able to speak to Israelis in their native language, and you will have a good foundation for studying Biblical Hebrew further, if you so wish.
The Hebrew vowels (nikkud)
Instead of letters, Hebrew uses dots and dashes that appear around the letters as vowel signs. These dots and dashes are called “nikkud” (ניקוד). In Modern Hebrew, using nikkud is way less common – it is usually used in religious scripts, children’s books and in dictionaries. In order to teach you how to read without nikkud, we’ve decided not to use nikkud in the course(except in specific cases, where two or more words are spelled the same but have different underlying vowels).
Very important! Never use nikkud when writing answers in Hebrew, the nikkud only appears when you need to translate a Hebrew sentence into English.
Content
We did our best to make the course content interesting. The course content is realistic and contains many phrases you will come across when speaking Hebrew with native Israelis. We’ve also added some humoristic sentences so you won’t get bored while learning.
Tips and notes
We did our best to cover all the basic grammar rules of the Hebrew language. The notes in the course explain all the grammar rules and special cases introduced in each skill. Some notes relate to individual lessons when each lesson introduces another language feature. We highly recommend you read them before starting each skill in order to prevent further misunderstandings. The tips and notes can be found in every skill (where they exist) under the lessons list.
Voice
The Hebrew course uses a real recorded voice (not TTS) – for that reason, the voice is not available for individual words but only for complete sentences. We recorded both male and female voices.
The voice recordings are very realistic, clear and bring you the correct way of speaking Hebrew with an Israeli accent. In Hebrew, some sentences can only be said by one gender. Therefore, where a sentence which only a male person can say appears, a male voice will appear and the same goes for female-only sentences.
For example: The sentence “I am a girl” will be followed by a female voice recording.
Hebrew keyboard
There are a few ways to use a Hebrew keyboard:
Hebrew keyboard stickers (recommended)
There are stickers for your keyboard you can buy, they look like this:
After buying these stickers here is how you can add Hebrew to your keyboard:
Or: after you bought your stickers, you can use this addon: click here (it is available only in Google Chrome).
This addon basically detects the input language currently needed in a lesson, and switches your keyboard to it. This way you don’t have to add Hebrew to your keyboard (it will work automatically with Duolingo).
Virtual keyboard
You can use a virtual keyboard – here.
Facebook group
You are more than welcome to join the official Facebook group of the Hebrew learners in Duolingo, here.
Learning resources
Forvo –pronunciation dictionary.
Wordreference – Hebrew resources thread.
A course containing all words in Duolingo Hebrew course: Memrise
A course for learning the Hebrew alphabet: Memrise
(Both Memrise courses were made by Mazzorano from team Hebrew)
Immersion resources
Popular news sites:
Online books:
E-vrit – Hebrew books app.
Sefer-li – Translated children books without vowels.
Music:
Hebrew songs – Words for Hebrew songs (including translations).
A post containing some Israeli musical artists. (Many thanks to Walrosse!)
Many thanks
We thank all people involved in the creation of this course, starting from the course contributors who invested so much of their free time, and ending with the wonderful staff at Duolingo who helped us with everything we needed. We’d also like to thank the Duolingo community for their support and patience during the development of this course.
Thank you! We couldn’t do it without you!
The only thing that’s left is to start learning Hebrew, בהצלחה – Be’hatslacha!
Good luck!
Selected comments on original post
SO MUCH THANK YOU for this course! The picture is missing up above for the keyboard stickers, just FYI.
Also, you said “Never use nikkud when writing answers in Hebrew” but when I typed in my answers during the initial placement test, a few times it came back saying “Almost Correct!” and highlighted the word, which was correct except it had nikkud. Thoughts?
That’s for reporting about the pic.
Regarding nikkud – it could work, but we didn’t cover all the answers so many sentences could be an issue.
אני חושב שתשובות באלף בית לטיני גם צריכות להתקבל, הרבה אנשים פשוט יתייאשו מהקורס לגמרי אם הם לא יכולים לכתוב בעברית בכלל
אולי צריך אופציה כמו בקורס הרוסי
הבעיה באלפבית לטיני היא שהוא מאוד שונה מהאלפבית העברי. זה לא כמו האלפבית הקירילי שהוא עוד איכשהו דומה לאלפבית הלטיני.
ובכנות, אני לא מאמין שצריך ללמוד עברית בלי ללמוד את האלפבית.
Duolinguists 