How to Learn Hebrew As an Adult, Without Living In Israel
Learning a language as an adult can be challenging. Learning a language as an adult when you aren’t surrounded by it can be even more so. And when resources for the language you’re trying to learn are spotty? איזה סיוט! (What a nightmare!)
I spent about a decade cobbling together my Hebrew. A few years back, I put together advice on how to learn Hebrew for someone who was curious. Then a rabbi asked if I’d share it with her, she forwarded it to her Judaism 101 students, and years later I’m hearing from people those students have forwarded the email to. So it’s time: time to make this official, time to take the time to write it nicely and give it a pretty URL that I can keep updated. And as a bonus, you get some “guest” tips from people who have used my advice along the way!
Some of this advice will be applicable to learning other languages, but I’ll include some really Hebrew-specific thoughts: that’s the part that I felt was truly missing from the internet. So read on, and בהצלחה!
My Own Journey
Like many Jews growing up in Reform synagogues in the US, I went to Hebrew school a couple times a week after school from 4th to 7th grade; in that same grand tradition, I came away knowing almost no Hebrew whatsoever. I knew how to read the letters, but all that meant was that I could sound things out without understanding what they said. I could construct a sentence using several of the fifty-or-so words I knew, but mostly, we learned prayers, not Hebrew.
I have always loved languages, but even so it took a while for Hebrew to make it onto my priority list. It wasn’t until I met my now-husband when I was twenty-two – I was frustrated enough at not being able to understand his phone conversations that I decided to bite the bullet and finally, actually, learn Hebrew.
Initially, I bought a couple books, and did enough study on my own to get into level three (gimel) when I started a class at a local synagogue. I had sporadic lessons after that, but I had hit the infamous Hebrew “plateau/valley of death” that comes right after gimel. (It is not infamous; it’s a term I made up, but I’ll get into it more later – we should talk about it.) Because of that, I didn’t make much progress until 2017 when I decided to start taking Hebrew seriously. Once I did that, I went from ‘low-intermediate’ to ‘fluent enough’ in a period of six or seven months – you’ve never seen my in-laws so surprised!
So: I’ve done it, and you can, too. Here’s what I recommend.
Before You Get Started
When learning something new, it’s often tempting to just dive in and go, but I’m going to suggest taking a step back and focusing on some fundamentals first. It will be worth it, I one-hundred-percent promise. Here’s what I recommend:
If you don’t know it already, learn the aleph-bet. While I don’t have specific resources to recommend, this is the aspect of Hebrew for which online resources are most plentiful, so you have your pick! Learn the letters in block and script and practice reading them in a few different fonts (internet font is different than biblical font and can really throw you if you’re not familiar with it). Make sure you know the vowels, then get ready to do almost everything without them.
Read the book Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner. I didn’t read this until I was well into my Hebrew studies, but the method it advocates for is similar to the one I had developed on my own. I’ll hit on several of the points in this post but the book is a fast read and highly, highly worth it. At the time of writing, the company the book inspired does not have a Hebrew program, which is a shame; if they develop one, you should definitely do that :)
As advocated in the above book, spend time on your accent. NOW. Spend some time practicing where your tongue and lips should be for each sound, and do it early so you don’t have to try to retrain yourself once you’ve picked up bad habits. YouTube did not exist when I was getting my Hebrew accent, but there are now videos that show you the positions of your tongue and lips (such as this one). You don't need to be perfect by any stretch, but you'll be amazed at how much Israelis appreciate even a better-than-average American accent (people *always* comment on it when I speak).
Side note: Perhaps you studied French at some point. If you did, that can serve you well here; I use a similar accent for both French and Hebrew and get rated “pretty good” in both (though French speakers are notoriously pickier). My high school French teacher always lamented my “hard” rs, but Israelis think those same rs are “French-sounding and sort of cute.” Let’s count that as a win.
Side note #2: In Hebrew school, we were taught that there are two silent letters – א and ע. (Side note within a side note: some Hebrew speakers don’t treat the ע as fully silent! But we won’t get into that here.) My accent dramatically improved when I realized that there are actually three-and-a-half silent letters: ה is also silent, and י is half the time. Try dropping your הs and your יs and listen to the magic happen.
Find a native Hebrew speaker you can practice speaking with. Maybe a friend, maybe someone you see day-to-day who is willing to work with you a bit. If you don’t have anyone in your life like that, use italki to find someone and set up short lessons; practicing talking is the only way to get better at it, and having someone around to answer questions as they come up is invaluable.
Set yourself up for success
You’ve done the basics, now it’s time to make sure you have the resources you need to be successful.
Books
Modern Hebrew for Beginners by Esther Raizen. I used this book (and the Intermediate one) to study on my own before joining a class; I really like these books for self-study.
Hebrew from Scratch — you don’t need to get this for study on your own, but if you’re taking a class odds are they’ll use this one. It would be a challenge to use without a teacher.
501 Hebrew Verbs — I *love* this book. When I make a flashcard for a verb and think I'm going to have difficulty with the conjugation, I take a photo of the page in the book and add it to the flashcard.
Online Resources
pealim.com: online site for verb conjugations (‘pealim’ means ‘verbs’). It's a great site if sometimes hard to use; I have occasionally found mistakes but not many.
morfix.co.il: best online Hebrew-English dictionary. It does not have any conjugations though, so as soon as you are comfortable enough in Hebrew you can switch over to …
milog.co.il: this is a super comprehensive Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary with every form of every word that you might ever need. I discovered it way too late and I'm not sure how I ever lived without it.
Reverso: This is a fantastic resource to see real-world examples of how words are used. You can look up either a Hebrew or an English word and get a bunch of sentences (mostly it seems from movies, TV shows, and online text) to get a sense of instances when the word would be used.
Google image search: I got this suggestion from Fluent Forever, and it’s a great one for visually learning the nuances of a word. If you look up the Hebrew word for sidewalk, you get photos of sidewalks in Israel. Sometimes you’ll realize that a word is mostly used in a religious context. I’ve also found it particularly useful for understanding how the different words that would roughly translate to ‘girl’ are used – image search makes it clear what the age range and objectification level is for each one (I know. Useful, but — I know).
Apps
Duolingo. In a departure from the Fluent Forever method, I strongly recommend Duolingo for Hebrew. I worked through it methodically and it really improved my spelling in a way it would not have improved otherwise. Spring for the paid version (I think it’s $80/year?) and you can use it with fewer constraints. It’s a great way to get a feel for the sorts of sentences you might see, though I’ll say the Hebrew on Duolingo is a notch “higher” than the Hebrew my in-laws speak. (See end notes for more discussion of “levels” of Hebrew.)
Anki. The most powerful flashcard software you never knew you were missing. It’s got the spaced repetition built in so you can benefit from the latest research on memory without having to think about it. There’s a learning curve of how to set up Anki, but it is more than worth it to spend the time getting it going. I have used Anki daily for the last 5.5 years, for learning everything from Hebrew, ASL, and Spanish, to constellations, the NATO alphabet, and all the birthdays of my husband’s family. (Coming soon: a cheat sheet on how to structure your Anki Hebrew flashcards!)
Audio
I didn’t use any podcasts because by the time I looked for them, none of them were at the right level for me. You can find lists online of existing podcasts for learning Hebrew and see if any of them work for you.
Guest tip from Tommy: Pimsleur audio is a great way to get some of the language in your ears and practice speaking while you’re on a walk or cooking dinner.
If you just want to listen to some Hebrew, you can always stream Radio Galgalatz (press that “play” button in the purple circle on the top left corner of the site). They do sometimes play English music, which is annoying, but you’ll get lots of Hebrew.
Music is always a fun way to learn a language! Here’s a link to a playlist of some of my favorite Hebrew songs as of summer 2022 — you can listen and explore from there.
Get going
Okay, now you’re ready to really get going! Your first steps are to read the grammar book and begin building your flashcard deck.
For the grammar book, I recommend sitting down with Modern Hebrew for Beginners for some longer stretches of time (at least 30 min). Unless you’ve studied Arabic, there are going to be some linguistic concepts that are brand new and are going to take some wrapping your head around. Give yourself the time, and don’t rush — just reread the pages as often as you need to to begin to internalize the linguistic structure.
And, flashcards! Begin making your flashcard deck with words from the grammar book, and also the vocabulary from Duolingo. (In my experience, Duolingo is great for some things but doesn’t provide sufficient vocabulary reinforcement or grammatical detail on its own, hence the book and the flashcard deck.)
There are different options with how you can set up your flashcards. Fluent Forever takes a strong stance that you can figure out if you agree with when you read the book, but I’m not quite so dogmatic. If you want to use an existing Hebrew deck for learning Duolingo vocabulary, it can be a great way to get started (and it has audio files, which would be really hard to make flashcards for yourself). I ended up building my own flashcard deck (without audio files) so I have not used either of these, but either this one or this one seem good.
Now you’ve got your flashcard deck, and the basics of Hebrew grammar are starting to seep into your brain. Here’s what I recommend for the next few months.
Do Duolingo every day. Maybe two lessons, maybe more, see what you think. It will be really painful at first -- you'll hate typing and you'll curse at the app and probably at me for recommending it -- but, as much as I hate to admit it, spelling really matters in Hebrew for reasons that you only internalize a bit later on. Duolingo doesn't use vowels, and that's a good thing. Other than in American siddurim and children's books (and, weirdly, poetry) Hebrew really isn't written with vowels. Practicing reading the way you'll have to read is the only way to get better at it.
Do your flashcards every day. Do as many as you can (I found Duolingo much more useful when I knew the vocabulary already and could just focus on sentence construction, so don’t worry about getting ‘ahead’). My personal limit was about thirty new flashcards each day – half of them were making the Hebrew->English connection for a new word, and the other half were learning to go English->Hebrew from the words I'd learned the day before. If you have a daily commute during which time you are not driving, that can be a great time to do these; I’ve done many on walks and on buses. Over the first year and a half I learned 2.5k new Hebrew words from flashcards, the majority of those in the first year — imagine knowing 2000 Hebrew words this time next year! It’s for sure doable.
Figure out the time of day that works best for you to study Hebrew. I find language learning so exciting (I know, I know) that I had to stop studying at least 30 minutes before I wanted to fall asleep or I’d be up trying to translate sentences in my head for hours. But some people like the bedtime routine, or doing a little in the morning and some over lunch. Try things out and see how it goes.
If you can find an ongoing class at a local synagogue or JCC, go ahead and join. But be sure that you’re joining a class that feels like a challenge, not one that you feel comfortable in; at the lower levels, you can always scramble to catch up (I have done this), but being bored in class is the opposite of motivating.
Guest tip from Jeff: Ulpan Or offers online classes, as well!
Love the language — translate in your head when you are reading books or when you see a sign; listen to music in Hebrew; watch shows. As soon as your level is high enough, watch shows with close captioning in Hebrew (not English subtitles).
At least once a week, catch up with your Hebrew buddy. Spend as much of the time speaking Hebrew as you can. It’s going to be painful, but it is absolutely the best way to improve speaking. Ask them any grammatical questions you have. Bring them sentences you ran across and tried translating into Hebrew and see what they think.
The Verb System / Binyanim
If you haven't learned about the verb system yet, that's going to be the thing that will blow your mind. It blew mine very hard for a period of about six months until I finally wrapped my head around its completely new and wonderful logic. Spend some time either learning about the verb system from a book (I used, again, Modern Hebrew for Beginners) or in a class, but give yourself time to really grasp it. It takes a while but it's at the root (pun intended!) of what makes the whole language so beautiful. You can read the Wikipedia page about it, but that Wikipedia page is actually a great example of why it’s so crucial to learn Hebrew using the Hebrew alphabet — the way that roots change doesn’t have a consistent logic if you write it out using the English alphabet.
Also, Hebrew only has three verb tenses. Hooray!!! Take those wins where you find them.
The Plateau / Valley of Death
I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, which has surprised me, but perhaps searching for “learning Hebrew, valley of death” isn’t the best way to find it. But what I have noticed is that when you’re trying to learn Hebrew, there are classes you can take at synagogues and JCCs, but only to a point: that point is knowing present and past tense in two or maybe three binyanim — what is typically “kita gimel” (the third level of classes that are offered).
After that, there’s a huge chasm. If there’s a fourth class at all, it’s a mix of people who don’t yet know the future tense and people who lived in Israel in the 70s and used to speak Hebrew fluently. The fourth level tends to be everyone who knows the past tense because most places don’t have a fifth class. This makes the fourth class – often – not very useful. Earlier, when I said that thing about joining the challenging class and not the one that bored you? I meant it about only doing that for beginning classes; the first time I tried bumping myself up to the fourth level because I found the third boring, I was so far over my head that I didn’t bother showing up for any more classes. (At one point, after reading something I only understood 30% of, the teacher asked the class how it was and the guy next to me replied “very easy, can we do something more interesting.”)
For me, the only way to get through this plateau/valley of learning was to brute force it. Whenever I had a verb on my flashcards, I made myself say aloud every single conjugation of the verb, in all three tenses. That is how I learned the future tense. It hurt for a few weeks (ok, maybe a month or two), but it was so, so worth it. That, plus the expanded vocabulary from flashcards, enabled me to jump back into “kita dalet” (the fourth level) and flourish.
Intensive Classes
Intensive classes – something like 5 hours a day of only speaking Hebrew — are by far the best way to learn. I did an intensive class for three weeks after getting myself through the aforementioned plateau, and my Hebrew improved about seven levels in that time. I can’t say enough good things — if you’re lucky enough to live in the Bay Area, the USF Ulpan is incredible. I’m sure there are other places that do this, but that’s one I can vouch for. (They actually moved online during the pandemic, so depending on their current setup, you should see if it’s possible for you to join!)
You can do intensive classes at any point, of course, and who knows if my years-long plateau might have been eased by those classes at an earlier time. But, for sure, once you know the basics of grammar and vocabulary and you just need to practice … there’s no better way to do it.
Other than doing it in a class in Israel, of course. But, sticking within the premise of this scenario, intensive classes in your local area are the best option.
Other Things To Know / End Notes
Spelling is actually important. I know, this sucks, and it does seem like for a phonetic alphabet that spelling should be easier. But back to the point about there being lots of silent letters — how you conjugate a verb depends on which of those silent letters is at the end (ugh, I know. My husband, who is not great at spelling in Hebrew, mis-conjugates verbs like this not infrequently. He doesn’t love it when I point it out.) Also, the letters used and the combination of letters used in a word can let you know if something is likely to be a loan word or not, which will significantly help in deciphering it.
You may get the hang of reading Hebrew, but if you figure out a way to get the hang of reading English words written in the Hebrew alphabet let me know. I once spent five minutes trying to decipher “rock and roll” transliterated into Hebrew, gave up, asked Ben, then threw the paper across the room.
Spoken Hebrew varies in a way that we don’t have an equivalent for in American English. The “higher” the language spoken, the more passive voice will be used by the speakers (see what I did there?); listening to the news or reading the paper can be a fully different experience than having a conversation. Be prepared for that.
Modern Hebrew is not biblical Hebrew. Don’t go taking a biblical Hebrew class if you’re hoping to roll into Ben Gurion airport and have a conversation. Take modern Hebrew, and then just enjoy the fact that the Torah feels like it’s written in a pseudo-future tense (except imperatives, which are — of course — written in the past).
Be prepared to spend a little time figuring out how to use your favored computer programs with Hebrew text. Hebrew is a right-to-left language, and some programs just really can’t handle it. Having both Hebrew and English text on the same line can be difficult (guest tip from Christina: if you must do it, use tables with different columns for each language) and if you paste Hebrew from somewhere else into your document, it will sometimes show up backwards. If you like to use, for instance, MS Word to make vocabulary lists, you’ll need to spend some time getting comfortable using it for Hebrew.
Watching movies and TV shows: These can be good to watch with subtitles to just get a feeling of what the language sounds like, but I do not believe that English subtitles will help you learn Hebrew. What will help is watching it with Hebrew closed captioning. Will it be slow and painful? Absolutely. But it will get less slow and less painful as time goes on. I watched the first two seasons of Shtisel this way and got 100x more out of it than watching all the episodes of Srugim with English subtitles. It took a lot longer, but made my Hebrew, and my Hebrew comprehension, much better.
And זהו! (that’s it!) I firmly believe that effort and excitement about learning the language will get you far. If you’ve been learning Hebrew and have a tip you’d like to share, feel free to get in touch!