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Living Language Hebrew, Complete Edition: Beginner through advanced course, including 3 coursebooks, 9 audio CDs, and free online learning?
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I think the key to learning Hebrew is to think of it like weight training. You need to maintain consistency, target all areas, develop routines, adjust depending on what works for you, and when you plateau, you need to vary things up.
What does that mean? Pick a few from the following strategies and try them out to see what works well. Get a routine going that involves using 1-3 of them every day, and make sure the methods, when combined, target all major areas (though realistically, you can put a bit less weight on writing): | reading | writing | listening | speaking | vocabulary | grammar |
This course is pretty decent for beginners, definitely the best bang for the buck. It works on | reading | writing | listening | vocabulary | grammar |
Do the Hebrew Duolingo. I recommend doing it on your computer when possible because it'll help with your typing skills. Get a Hebrew keyboard overlay or stickers from Amazon. Make a point of verbally repeating/speaking every prompt and sentence whenever possible. | reading | writing | listening | vocabulary | grammar |
Also do the Memrise companion course as you move through the Duolingo. It'll reinforce the vocab and allow you to better internalize the Duolingo lessons. | vocab | reading | writing | listening |
Practice verb conjugations. For every verb you learn, right it down on a flashcard. Once a day, pick 10 flashcards and conjugate the verb in all forms and tenses. Or, for a shorter practice make 2 other decks, one for tense and one for subject (i.e. you - male, they - female, we). Then you draw a verb and a card from each deck, and write the conjugation (i.e. "to go", past, they). Use Pealim.com religiously to check your conjugations and learn new verbs. | writing | vocab |
Make a flashcard for every new word you learn, always. Personally I like the brainscape app because you can rank each card on a color scale for how well you know it, and the app's algorithm will serve you new cards and cards you're struggling with more frequently. Practice the cards whenever you have downtime (every poop break is now a learning opportunity!) Read the cards out loud whenever possible. | reading | vocab |
Get a kids book and work your way through it. Mark each new word and add it to your flash cards. When you're done with the book, read it again. Sounds terrible, I know, but it'll go twice as fast the second time around. Note which words you marked and now know. Practice the ones you marked and still didn't remember the second time around. Diary of a Whimpy kid in Hebrew is a good starter book. | reading | vocab |
Listen to podcasts and the radio. Streetwise Hebrew is fantastic, and for radio I use Tunein Radio. Some good channels are Here is Culture, 103, Galei Zahal. | listening | vocabulary |
Watch Israeli movies and TV, on youtube whenever possible (because you can slow down the speed). צפוף is a great show, and it's quite funny. I also like לה פמיליה. היהודים באים is totally irreverent and absurd but quite funny as well (not recommended for religious people, it's not exactly the most PC show out there). You can also search for Israeli shows or movies on Netflix and find some good ones. Just pause and rewind as needed and write down new words (skip niche words and focus on important ones) for later practice. | vocabulary | reading | listening |
Most important: speak to people. As much as you can and stay in Hebrew. Do one of those online conversation partner things, find some other Hebrew speakers, go to language exchanges, whatever it takes, but always be speaking lots and lots of Hebrew. | speaking | listening | vocabulary |
Try some of these out and cycle through them as needed and you'll be surprised at how quickly you pick it up!
I loved Duolingo but if you’re only using the app you may want to give the actual website a go. There’s more info and stuff to read there that doesn’t make it onto the app. So like stuff you’d find in textbooks.
I also bought this text (Living Language) on amazon. Has some errors in it but you get three books and CDs for such a good price (I think I even used a holiday 40% off a book purchase coupon to buy mine so it was super cheap!)
I had a bit more Hebrew than you when I started the Living Language course (I’d taken some Hebrew in University though had a pretty awful professor who graded too easy and gave answers away during exams. I learned more Hebrew just through constant exposure because I also majored in Middle East studies and am an Israeli politics dork.) But because I was primarily self taught I had lots of gaps in knowledge. I like that Living Language is actually a workbook you can write in. So I started from the beginning and plowed through the stuff I knew quickly and went from there. Couldn’t complain for the price and with how much you get. Grab yourself a good dictionary too. Watch tv and movies and listen to Israeli music. I have several other textbooks too but had the same issue that a lot were too simple, some were religious (and simple), etc. my biggest problem is I haven’t had much practice speaking. I can read and understand a lot of spoken Hebrew well and my pronunciation isn’t bad but I’m not good at expressing myself in Hebrew or forming sentences on my own. And all the textbooks in the world won’t give you that. You’re going to want to find someone to speak Hebrew with ideally.
But yeah, I think the Living Language Collection is probably a good one for you. There’s also the books that are used in Ulpan in Israel. You can find them on amazon and they move pretty fast so I’m unsure if you’d want the first level 1 book or the second. The biggest issue is that they’re pricey and the answer key is sold separately. I think I’ve seen them for sale cheaper on Jewish book websites than on Amazon but still much pricier than Living Language.
One thing you can try is googling "intro modern hebrew syllabus" and see what texts those introductory courses are using (I know the UofA only has courses on biblical hebrew, but many other institutions teach modern hebrew). Here's a few books on Amazon that I found off of those syllabi .
The UofA libraries also gives you free access to some ebooks like this one if you want to save costs.
If you look around I'm sure you can find a text that suits you.
I'm finding the Living Language course (Amazon link) to be really helpful and an awesome value: three textbooks ("essential," intermediate, and advanced) plus the accompanying audio lessons, for around $35USD. They also have a free In-Flight Hebrew phrasebook that might be good for the quick basics.
Those laminated reference cards (like this — Amazon link) tend to be really helpful for cramming the most important information into a small space too.
I just got this series on the recommendation of a friend and so far I'm quite pleased with it. It comes with 3 books (over 1,000 pages) plus 9 audio cd's, all for $30 and the information seems to be structured quite well. Of course, they try to push you to pay for a subscription to their online "bonus learning" service, but I'm not doing that and I definitely don't feel like I'm missing out or lacking in info. My advice if you get these is not to write out exercises in the books themselves, but instead get a notebook and write literally everything down. If you write in the book, you'll just fill in blanks with single words. Instead, in your notebook, write out all the full sentences, all the new vocab, and write them all in both classic hebrew script and hebrew cursive (there's a reference in the book's appendix for the cursive). By doing that, you'll get the vocab down much quicker and you'll be comfortable writing Hebrew much faster.
Other than that, there are 2 Udemy courses that are pretty decent, especially to help with pronunciation and some basics of structure. Start with this one then do this one. You can buy them for $35 and $20 respectively, or do what I did. Sign up for a Udemy account and add both courses to your wishlist. Udemy has $5 sales all the time (like once every month or two) so you'll get an email when they have a sale and you can get both courses for $10 total.
Also this is a good app for phrases/some vocab/flashcard study, and this is a good one for a ton of vocab.
If you have Hulu, watch Prisoners of War and Srugim with English subtitles. Listen for sentences that are simple and easy to understand. In a notebook, write out the english, and then figure out the hebrew using the aforementioned apps plus this website for verb conjugations.
It takes a lot of self-motivation to do all those things, but it'll be worth it.
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