Learning Hebrew

Travelling to a new country is always an exciting adventure. The transient nature of your travels allows you to forget about your burdens and immerse yourself in the country's culture, customs, food, and sights.

Moving to a new country is an entirely different kind of adventure. I have already spoken about the difficulties of acquiring things the doctor and I deem to be basic standards of living (i.e. food, housing, and internet), but have yet to speak of something that is truly necessary to flourish in a new country: learning the common language. In Israel, the most common language is Hebrew, so I set out to learn this historic language.

I decided to start with learning the alphabet. I jumped over to YouTube, found a few nice alphabet writing and pronunciation tutorials, and before I knew it, I had a beautifully organized table depicting the three ways that each letter can be written.

What's interesting (aka impossible) about Hebrew that you may have noticed from the table is that there are very few vowels in the alphabet. The letter A is really the only stand alone vowel (and sometime Y like in English). All other vowels are created by modifying pre-existing letters.

Take the letter V for example (#6 in the chart). It can be modified using what is called a niqqud (most often a dot) to create the letters O and U depending on where the niqqud is placed. Other vowel sounds are created by adding niqquds onto consonants, however, niqquds are used extremely rarely in Hebrew writing meaning that you just have to know what the word is. As a non-native, this means a whole lot of guessing.

Let's see an example to show just how complicated learning this language is turning out to be for me.
Take the word falafel. You may think it's written something like this (including the niqqud for the 'eh' vowel sound):

But it's actually written like this:

 

Not only is the first A missing, but there is no indication of any other vowels. Also, I forgot to mention that everything is written from right to left!
To further complicate things, the niqquds used to distinguish between consonants (see #17 P/F for example) are also rarely used, meaning that the Hebrew written falafel shown above looks more like P/F  L  A  P/F  L  to the untrained eye.

Here's one for you to try that every young child would instantly be able to recognize but is not so easy for those trying to learn the language. It feature two letters that use niqquds to distinguish between two consonant choices (#21 Sh/S and #2 B/V) as well as the letter ayin (#16) which has no definitive sound. There are many possible ways to say this 'three letter word' without any niqquds. What's your guess? Comment below!