Difficulty of Modern Hebrew

[aindreas]

Found nothing of this sort tagged, so apologies if it's been discussed before. How difficult is it for a native English speaker to gain a basic proficiency in Modern Israeli Hebrew? What are the more challenging aspects? Troublesome grammar? Foreign vocabulary

Comments

[tcherniak]

How difficult is it for a native English speaker?
Not easyer and not more difficult than any other foreign language that has nothing in common with English.

[muckefuck]

I wouldn't say it has "nothing in common with English". The phonemic inventories overlap nicely (the /x/, /r/, and /ʔ/ he's got covered due to German) and so does the grammar: gendered pronouns, three tenses, definite articles, etc.--it's not at all like learning Thai! And there are even enough internationlisms in vocabulary to give him a leg up on the lexicon.

[tcherniak]

yes and no :)

[sca_sethe]

I can't offer much information besides ~ If you want to learn it, you'll learn it. You just got to be dedicated to learning. And as you seem to have been able to do that with German and Spanish, I think you're good. Just go for it :)

[muckefuck]

Modern Israeli Hebrew has sometimes been called "a Standard Average European language with a Semitic vocabulary". That is to say, its originally Semitic grammar has been extensively restructured under the influence of European languages (particularly German). So it probably comes down to what gives you more trouble when learning a language, grammar or vocabulary.

[embryomystic]

German, or Yiddish?

[muckefuck]

Jacke wie Hose.

[embryomystic]

If you say so.

[ms_cucumber]

I think learning Hebrew is about as hard as learning French because of the different conjugations and the masculine/feminine thing.

I learned French and Hebrew and to me they were all about brute memorization. I'm trying to learn Japanese and I'm finding just trying to understand how the language works is much more difficult to begin with.

[fynoda]

What's fun about Hebrew is that they take out the vowels in common usage. So, essentially, it's lk rdng nglsh wtht th vwls (like reading English without the vowels).

[naatz]

It's a lot more effort to read WITH vowels than without, once you know enough grammar and morphology. The whole thing with patterns is that you can guess what the vowel pattern is without being told. The system goes spectacularly haywire when you bring foreign {non-Semitic} words into the system, though. :D

|Meduza|

[hkitsune]

It's actually nothing like reading English without the vowels. English has a completely different syllable structure and morphological structure. Words are not built up in "meaning-based" units. And furthermore, if you TEND to not use vowels, it will be easier to not use vowels. This was something I found rather easy to deal with in learning Aramaic, which has basically identical spelling conventions.