Thread: Ask Me About The Hebrew Language

WELL are you an american or what howd you coem to learn hebrew? is hebrew your native language?


ON the israel note since it was fromed so to speak in 1948 whats up with the hebrew language before the increas in jewish immigration to palestin in the 1800. was it a dead langauge only spoken by rabbis as a kind of traditional thing for most of its history and then revived??

and if you did learn hebrew after you leanred english how hard was it to learn.... i understand it is a very complicated langauge and old....

thanks i have other questions to but none come to mind i never really talked to a hebrew person or israeli (im assumiing u are)

Originally Posted by dragonoverlord

WELL are you an american or what howd you coem to learn hebrew? is hebrew your native language?
ON the israel note since it was fromed so to speak in 1948 whats up with the hebrew language before the increas in jewish immigration to palestin in the 1800. was it a dead langauge only spoken by rabbis as a kind of traditional thing for most of its history and then revived??

and if you did learn hebrew after you leanred english how hard was it to learn.... i understand it is a very complicated langauge and old....

thanks i have other questions to but none come to mind i never really talked to a hebrew person or israeli (im assumiing u are)[/b]

I was born in America, but the rest of my family (including siblings) were born in Israel, and immigrated to America a few years before I was born. Hebrew is my native language though, and that is all I spoke till age 2 or 3 when the people at preschool thought I was retarded or something because I didn't know English, and since I speak mostly Hebrew at home, I still can speak it fluently without too much of an American accent.

About it being a dead language, the Hebrew in the bible isn't exactly a dead language, but it compares to modern Hebrew like Shakespearean English compares to modern English, and for someone like me who doesn't speak Hebrew all the time (only at home), it is difficult to understand some of it (though you can still generally get the gist of almost everything there if you speak fluent hebrew). The modern Hebrew was created in the 1800s sometime by some guy who's name I don't remember. It is the same language as the ancient Hebrew, but with many words taken from other languages like German and Russian, and with words taken from English being constantly added for technological things like email.

Reading and writing Hebrew fluently is a major pain in the ass as it has a different alphabet, and if you want to read anything above a 2nd grade level, there won't be any vowels (they are only used to help little kids learn), so you have to be able to assume the word from the letters and context (like know schl is school). This is something I cannot do well at all, and reading this post in Hebrew would probably take me an hour if not more. As for learning to speak, the vocabulary isn't too difficult as there are far less words than in English, but there are some grammar syntax things that would be difficult especially for a native English speaker (like am, is, and are are implied so litterally translated I am a llama (ani lama) would be I llama).

If you have any more questions feel free to ask, and I'll be happy to answer them. I'll do any random translations to Hebrew (or from if it is transliterated) too, as long as they're of reasonable length.