Are you looking to learn Modern Hebrew mostly spoken in Israel, and by Israelis across the world? Or are you looking to learn Biblical Hebrew? Modern Hebrew is derived from Biblical Hebrew, so both are quite similar in vocabulary however there are of course obvious differences such as the fact that biblical Hebrew is a Verb-Subject-Object language, while modern Hebrew is Subject-Verb-Object based.
This article will focus on learning Modern Hebrew. Compare that to someone who wants to live in Israel and work for an Israeli company, their language learning process might be more arduous. That being said, if this is your first language that you are studying, you can still achieve a high level of proficiency if you put in the hours and effort.
Hebrew is a Semitic language while English is an Indo-European language. There are very few similarities right off the bat in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and writing when compared with English. This is often what intimidates English speakers to learn Hebrew.
However, you might find comfort knowing that Hebrew word order is similar to English, as mentioned before, it follows a general Subject-Verb-Object SVO word order. Although admittedly it is more flexible. Hebrew is a hard language for English natives. But this should not deter you from giving it a shot. So how hard is it for an Arabic speaker to learn Hebrew? This is interesting, because both Arabic and Hebrew are similar in the fact that they are both Semitic languages, and there are some similar words between MSA Modern Standard Arabic and Hebrew.
Students asked him questions in both Hebrew and Arabic, and Miari answered in both languages. There are many classes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
We have a different mission, which is to put people together for a dialogue based on linguistic parameters. Nevertheless, common and divergent perspectives are explored in classroom discussions about culture, identity, and more, Al Ani said, and politics cannot completely be avoided. Students get to look at topics from both perspectives, and in our Friday class, we try to pair them so that they are learning from each other.
As much as possible, we encourage them to run the discussion. Abouneameh agrees. Having said that, I have seen dedicated students, after three years of Al-Kitaab, move on to reading and translating classical philosophical and theological texts. Hence, the most important take away is the solid foundation in grammar.
In fact, the rules of Hebrew grammar were established and recorded in grammatical manuals, mostly in Al-Andalus, after the proliferation of Arabic grammatical manuals, which served as a reference.
Based on that experience I can say the following:. I suspect that I am pretty typical among academics in that I use classical languages almost entirely to recognize key words or reconstruct original quotations and tags with an English translation to hand, not to do real philology or even real extended reading in the original. Studying either Hebrew or Arabic hard for a year would allow you to do this, and I think it would be very useful. Why not just finish learning the Hebrew Alphabet right now, during the next hour you have to spare?
Published by Adam Kotsko. Best of luck with the language learning, regardless of with which you start! Based on that experience I can say the following: 1 Biblical Hebrew is way easier. Fewer verb classes, smaller vocabulary, simpler syntax. Follow Following.
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