Lung Cancer Center

by Neal Walters. I first wanted to learn some introductory Hebrew for a tourist trip to Israel. The trip got postponed from 1990 to 1996 due to Desert Storm. Via a language catalog (there was no internet then), I discovered the FSI courses. I had used FSI for Brazilian Portuguese, and thus ordered it for Hebrew. At least Portuguese used the same alphabet as English, but Hebrew required learning 22 new characters, and reading at first was very slow. Back then, the FSI course included a large book and about 24 cassette tapes (today, you can find the book in PDF and the tapes are often on MP3 files). The course was designed for instructor-lead classroom use, and was definitely not designed for home-study. To this day, I have never finished that course. I remember being “wowed” by a huge Borders book store on a business trip to Indianapolis. Back then, the stores were all huge, typically two stories, and they had a wide selection of books – meaning a few book on Hebrew. I found a primer or “reader” that taught the Hebrew alphabet in a very step by step fashion, with lots of practice exercises. Attending synagogue and learning some of the Hebrew prayers really accelerated my understanding of Hebrew. The music, along with the weekly repetition, clearly helps with the learning the words and phrases. Each week, I would pick a favorite tune, and go home and break down the words of that particular prayer. I used Menahem Mansoor’s “Biblical Hebrew: Step by Step” to get an introduction to Biblical Hebrew. A few years later, a friend taught Biblical Hebrew to a small group using Jacob Weingreen’s “A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew”. This is a very serious book, which we finished a couple of years later, doing one lesson every week or two. A full exposur to Hebrew requires at least some Modern (“Modernit”) and Biblical (“Tanachit”). Two modern Hebrew books from bookstores includes 3 or 4 cassette tapes: “Hugo Language Course: Hebrew in Three Months” and also Eliezar Tirkel’s “Every Hebrew”. Listening to audio in the car is one of my favorite ways to learn any language; the trick is that the lessons don’t get too complex too fast. A few years ago, I signed-up for two semesters of an online Hebrew course offered by Boston’s Hebrew College. The textbook was “Hebrew From Scratch – Part II” (with 5 CDs available). There was a lot of homework required, and we met with our teacher online each week for practicing conversation. Later, I took classes in Aggadic Literature and Talmud, which introduced Medieval Hebrew and Aramaic. I still feel that I have just scraped the surface of learning the beautiful Hebrew language. By creating courses and teaching classes for others, I have continue to learn more each and every day. Children and adults both learn Hebrew the fast and easy way with the multimedia Hebrew courses created by Neal Walters.