Any student of Hebrew must begin his or her adventure by learning the letters and vowels.  This includes being able to sound out, or pronounce written words.  Most students begin with the "printed" or "book" style Hebrew, and learn cursive later.  While most of Europe and the Americas uses the Latin alphabet, Hebrew is entirely different, consisting of 22 letters and vowels that are written as special symbols above and below the letters.

The beginner student must examine his goals.  While some students want to learn to read the Hebrew Bible, other students are preparing for a trip to Israel, and need to learn modern Hebrew. Other students might want to learn how to read the sidur (Hebrew prayerbook).

One tool for beginning to learn Biblical Hebrew is to learn the basic vocabulary.  You can get list of Hebrew words and their frequency of use, so it makes sense to learn the most popular words first.  We offer the "Top 400 Words of the Hebrew Bible" as an audio-product on 4 CDs, or it's also included within our beginner software tutorial.

Let's compare Modern and Biblical Hebrew.  The verb systems are very similar, but Hebrew tends use the perfect and imperfect (past and future) where as Modern Hebrew uses those and a lot of the present tense. Nouns are similar, but Biblical Hebrew might talk about chariots, kings, and prophets, modern Hebrew might talk about plains, trains, and automobiles.

Students should also beware homonyms.  For example, the word "ATAH" can mean "you" or "now", depending on how it is spelled in Hebrew. One is spelled with an "AYIN" and the other with an "ALEPH"; both are letters are treated as silent letters to the beginner student.  Our software tutorial shares some of the words that are mostly commonly confused by beginners.

Learning numbers is another challenge.  Hebrew has both masculine and feminine numbers, so the student must learn to count to 10 two different ways!  A good way to enforce numbers is telling time, or doing simple math problems in Hebrew.

Games certainly make learning fun, especially for children.  It is common for Hebrew study to begin at age 3 for Jewish children.  So if you are wondering if your child can learn Hebrew, the answer is a resounding YES!

Just like we have cursive and printed letters in English, Hebrew has both styles of letters.  People learning modern Hebrew will eventually want to learn the cursive letters.  Biblical students need not learn the letters, but it's actually easier to write the cursive letters than to try to print-out the "book-style" letters.  No one really "prints" in Hebrew, everybody uses cursive.