Learn Hebrew for Travel, Work and Study

The alphabet has twenty-two letters, all consonants, written from right to left with no capitals; five letters change shape at the end of a word. Vowels exist as small dots and dashes under and beside the letters, but they are printed only in children's books, poetry and prayer books; a newspaper, a menu and a text message leave them out, so the three letters s-f-r can be read as “sefer”, a book, “sapar”, a barber, or “safar”, he counted, and the reader chooses from context. This is less alarming than it sounds: within a few months a learner reads common words whole, as English readers do, and uses the dotted texts to learn new ones. Handwritten Hebrew uses a cursive whose letters differ from print and is learned separately.

Hebrew grammar is Semitic, and its heart is the root-and-pattern system: a three-consonant root carries a meaning, and a set of patterns — seven for verbs, more for nouns — turns it into every related word. Gender runs through everything. Nouns are masculine or feminine, adjectives and verbs agree, numbers have two forms, and “you” comes in four — masculine, feminine, singular, plural — so a learner chooses the sex of the person they are addressing in every sentence. There is no present tense of “to be” and no indefinite article; the definite article is a prefix, “ha-”, and a small word, “et”, marks a definite object. Possession is said as “there is to me”: “yesh li”.

The register of modern Hebrew is informal to the point of bluntness. Everyone is on first names, including the professor and the prime minister; there is no polite “you”; requests are direct, and Israelis describe their own style with the Arabic loan “dugri”, straight talk. Politeness lives in warmth rather than formula — “bevakasha” for please and you're welcome, “toda raba” for thank you very much — and in a repertoire of slang that has to be learned early because everyone uses it: “sababa”, great, “yalla”, let's go, “balagan”, a mess, “nu”, well, come on.

Israeli Hebrew is one standard with small variations of accent, chiefly in how the guttural letters are pronounced: speakers of Middle Eastern origin may keep the throaty “ayin” and “het” that most Israelis have flattened. The Hebrew of the prayer book and the Bible is the same language at an older stage, readable by a modern speaker with effort and taught to Jewish children worldwide for religious purposes; it is not what this page is about, and a learner of either should know that the other is close but not identical. Hebrew's sister language is Arabic, and the two share roots, patterns and a great many words.

For an English speaker Hebrew is a middle-to-long language — about 1,100 classroom hours before professional working proficiency, on the US Foreign Service Institute's scale, in the same group as Russian and Turkish. The alphabet takes a week or two, reading without vowels a few months, and the root system, once it clicks, is a multiplier: every new root brings a family of words. The long work is listening, because Israelis speak fast, swallow syllables and switch registers, and gender agreement, which has to become automatic in every sentence. The ulpan model — five mornings a week for five months — exists because Hebrew rewards intensity.

A visitor needs no Hebrew in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem or any tourist setting; English is spoken widely and well, menus and signs are often trilingual, and Russian, French and Arabic are heard everywhere. A resident meets Hebrew the moment they deal with the state — the health fund, the bank, the municipality, the school — and in any job outside the technology sector, which runs largely in English. Universities teach bachelor's degrees in Hebrew and require a proficiency level before admission; most master's and all international programmes are in English. In the Jewish diaspora, Hebrew is taught in community schools from childhood, so a learner abroad is rarely far from a class.

• The first native speaker was a child: Modern Hebrew's first mother-tongue speaker was a boy whose father forbade any other language at home, in a city where nobody else spoke it to their children. Within a generation it had a school system.
• Letters are numbers: Each letter has a numerical value, and the letters for eighteen spell “chai”, life — which is why gifts and donations in Israel come in multiples of eighteen.
• Shalom: Hello, goodbye and peace in one word; “ma shlomkha” — literally “what is your peace?” — is “how are you?”.
• The days have numbers, not names: Sunday is “yom rishon”, the first day, through to “yom shishi”, Friday, the sixth; only the seventh has a name, Shabbat.
• Four ways to say you: “Ata” to a man, “at” to a woman, “atem” and “aten” to groups: every sentence addressed to someone states their sex, and learners get it wrong charmingly for a year.
• Yalla, sababa, balagan: Israeli slang is a map of the country's neighbours: “yalla” and “sababa” from Arabic, “balagan” from Russian, and a flood of English verbs with Hebrew endings, like “le-fakses”, to fax.
• One root, a whole family: From “l-m-d”, learn: “lomed”, he learns, “limed”, he taught, “talmid”, a pupil, “Talmud”, the great book of study, “melumad”, learned. New words are coined the same way today.

Hebrew has no international exam series and uses two home-grown measures instead. The first is the ulpan ladder: the state's intensive Hebrew courses for immigrants are organised in six levels named after the first six letters of the alphabet, from Aleph for beginners to Vav for advanced, and the level completed is what Israelis mean when they ask how much Hebrew you have. University language centres, above all the Hebrew University's Rothberg school, teach foreign students on the same ladder and issue level certificates. The second is the YAEL, the Hebrew proficiency test set by Israel's National Institute for Testing and Evaluation, taken by applicants to Hebrew-taught degrees; each university sets the score it requires, and a high score earns exemption from further Hebrew study, the “ptor” that students talk about.

No Israeli visa or residence permit requires Hebrew. Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, for Jews and their families, asks for none; naturalisation by other routes asks for “some knowledge of Hebrew”, judged by the Interior Ministry without a graded exam. Employers in technology ask for English; everyone else assumes Hebrew and judges it in the interview. Progress is quick for those who commit: a full-time ulpan takes a beginner to a working everyday Hebrew in about five months, and a year of evening classes to roughly the same point.

Hebrew self-study has two problems — reading words without their vowels and conjugating verbs across seven patterns — and both have excellent free solutions built by Israelis. A dictionary that shows every word with its vowel points, a verb site that conjugates any root in every pattern and tense, and the public broadcaster's news for daily listening cover the kit. Flashcards earn their place if each card carries the word with its vowels on one side and without on the other, so that the eye learns to read the bare consonants.

A tutor's main gift in Hebrew is speed and gender. The root system can be studied from a book; agreeing every verb and adjective with the right sex while speaking at Israeli pace comes only from conversation with someone who corrects it gently and often. A tutor also supplies the slang and the register — which greeting fits a shop and which a meeting — and, for learners who know prayer-book Hebrew, the hundred small ways in which the modern language has moved on.