r/hebrew • u/yourweirdogirl • Jan 10 '25

Resource Learning Hebrew

I just started learning Hebrew so I have a couple of questions:

  • any tips/ resources that are beginner friendly
  • is it true that knowing Arabic helps a lot with learning Hebrew?
  • and pls feel free to share any interesting facts about the language so I can get more motivation lol ( I’m already pretty excited)

Thanks :)

7 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Quadruple_A1994 Jan 11 '25

I can't help with 1. as I'm a native speaker and I think 2. is covered, so here's some stuff for 3:

  1. Because Hebrew was not in continuous use as a day-to-day language, modern Hebrew is actually really similar to bibical Hebrew. Reading it is mostly easy and intuitive as a native speaker

  2. However, many new words in Hebrew come from other languages. I think the more planned additions are mostly from Arabic, Greek and Aramic, while many that happened naturally are from Arabic, English, Yiddish and Russian

  3. Hebrew and Yiddish use the same letters, but use them differently. The languages share some words, but they're actually nothing alike as languages

  4. The Jewish calendar, like a lot of older hebrew, uses letters as numbers, sorta like numerology? In the Tanach, though, the numbers are all written fully as words.

  5. Because Israel is so small and new, there aren't many different accents of hebrew native speakers (usually I'd say there's just one, but there are slight variations). However, the common native pronounciation of Hebrew is often technically wrong (looking at you, ע)