Israel > The JTF Hebrew Club

How to learn Ivrit! (Hebrew) - a method not THE method ;)

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TavorIMI:
Shalom,

I base this on how to learn ANY language.

First a little history of me: I am a native English speaker from the UK. I speak fluent French, good Flemish, poor Hebrew (getting better :)) some Mandarin Chinese and a smattering of a several more European languages.

So what's the easy trick to learning Hebrew?...

Bad news is there isn't one!
Good news is there are many!

OK lets back track a bit. You have all learnt at least one language. That's the language you speak, read and write right now. AKA your native language. So think back, how did you learn this language.

You may think this is a stupid question, after all you were so young you don't remember. Fair  enough, let me tell you how you did it.

Everyone starts off by listening. Well that's easy for a start. You have two ears and one mouth so it makes sense that you need to listen at least twice as much as trying to talk. Now this normally leads to a common problem for new learners of any language, in this case, how do you listen to native Hebrew?

Easy, live in Israel  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

Ok so what if you don't live in Israel, I guess you can't listen to native Hebrew right?   WRONG!!!!

I live in the UK and am currently listening to an Israeli radio station - רדיו קליק ישראלי  Quite simply if I can't go to Israel then Israel will have to come to me! Here is the address for this particular station: http://www.radioclick.fm/#ClickIL

You need to train your ear so that Hebrew is "normal" and NOT a foreign language. It doesn't matter whether you understand it or not. You need to get into the frame of mind that Hebrew is "normal".

Ok this could be a long post so part two in a bit...

Shalom
 

TavorIMI:
Ok part 2:

We learnt in part 1 that listening to Hebrew is very important. If you don't know a single word of Hebrew then the first thing you need to do is to listen so that you can tell what is a word and where the breaks are.

With the power of the internet it is EASY to bring Israel to you whether you live in the UK, US or anywhere. You tube is a fantastic resource for listening to Hebrew with the advantage of seeing the context as well.

This is exactly what you did as a child when you learnt your native language.

OK will this teach you Hebrew? Simple answer... no. Blimey I thought it was going to be easy!

Well again when you were a child you listened to your native language 24/7 BUT also from time to time someone explained what those sounds actually meant. Now this is where we as adults have an advantage over babies.

We can use our intellect to ask and pinpoint exactly what we do and do not understand. Now the ideal situation here is to have a local Israeli to help us 24/7. Yeah right, not going to happen.

So what do we do. Well it is at this time we need to use a training aid. Pimsleur FSI etc. most of which can be obtained free via torrents etc. In fact the FSI course is a FREE resource.

http://www.fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Hebrew

There you go, I couldn't make it any easier  ;D

Remember when you were a child you learnt to understand first, then speak and sometime later how to read and write. More of that later :) Ok I'll see how this goes and if anyone has any questions then I'll get on to reading and writing and children's TV!

Shalom

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